Google adds Trump’s Truth Social app to Play Store after it complies with moderation rules

Google has added former US president Donald Trump’s Truth Social app to Play Store nearly two months after it banned the social media platform due to a violation of its content moderation policies.

Apps featuring on Google’s Play Store that host user-generated content (UGC) are required to have content-moderation policies which prevent illegal content as well as those that incite violence or are considered hate speech.

Google also requires apps to provide a robust in-app system for reporting objectionable content and users, and a system to take action against such content or users.

“Apps that contain or feature UGC, including apps which are specialised browsers or clients to direct users to a UGC platform, must implement robust, effective, and ongoing UGC moderation,” Google noted in its Play Store policies.

In August, Google had said Truth Social was being kept from Android phones due to content moderation problems the platform hadn’t addressed then.

“On 19 August we notified Truth Social of several violations of standard policies in their current app submission and reiterated that having effective systems for moderating user-generated content is a condition of our terms of service for any app to go live on Google Play,” a Google spokesperson had said.

On Wednesday, Axios reported that Google had approved the app, which then soon went live for download on the Play Store.

Truth Social was launched in February as an iOS app and continues to be available on Apple’s platforms.

It was launched primarily as a way for the former president and his supporters to continue to communicate and organise, after he was banned from Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms in the aftermath of the Jan 6 Capitol riots.

Truth Social was marketed as a free speech app with more permissive policies than other mainstream social media apps.

But it ran into several hurdles for its content moderation policies, including violations of policies requiring apps to ban content such as physical threats and incitement to violence.

With nearly half of US smartphone users relying on Google’s Android operating system, the new move means more people could download Trump’s app.