MAGA social media apps are 'crashing and burning' -- and hackers are taking advantage: report

In the wake of former President Donald Trump's ban from major social media platforms, many right-wing alternatives such as Parler, Gab, and GETTR have sprung up as alternatives for Trump fans.

The Daily Beast reports, however, that these apps are often "crashing and burning before they can even get going," and are leaving their users vulnerable to hackers.

As Adam Rawnsley and Shannon Vavra write, it will be surprising if Trump's new TRUTH Social platform successfully launches without getting hit by the problems seen by other right-wing Twitter alternatives.

"The only thing more inevitable than a new app launch touting free speech is an embarrassing string of hacks, mass scrapes, pranksters taking advantage of loopholes, and content moderation dumpster fires that follow their debut," they write.

Security experts who spoke with the authors argue that the apps' designers seemingly all have "a critical lack of technical skills, experience in running major social media apps, and interest in or awareness of the kinds of threats that social media platforms face in keeping hackers, creeps, and terrorists from harming their users."

While Trump could presumably afford to pay programmers who know what they're doing to design TRUTH Social, they doubt he even understands what he's getting himself into.

Adam Hadley, the director of Tech Against Terrorism, predicted that Trump's platform was very likely to be overrun with pro-ISIS accounts at the outset.

"You can be swarmed very easily by terrorist use," he said. "There's no easy solution. You need people to be making difficult decisions about content and before you even do that you need to know what your policy is and you need a press and PR capability to deal with media responses."

Read the whole report here.