Liz Truss to launch ‘uncensored’ social network to counter mainstream media

Liz Truss is preparing to launch her own social media platform championing free speech, as she warned the “deep state” and mainstream media were stifling freedom of expression in Britain. The former prime minister said the platform would launch this summer. It is her latest attempt to become a leading figure on the radical right in Britain, openly declaring her support for Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s mission to slash state spending in the US. Truss made the revelation at a cryptocurrency conference in Bedford over the weekend. She said that she had been “cut off at the knees” when she became prime minister by “the elite”, which opposed radical change. “That has made me think that it’s not enough just to get into number 10,” she said. “What I’m now thinking is we need a media network to be able to communicate to people, to be able to have a grassroots movement that is actually really demanding change of our leaders.” She said she was worried about how issues were “suppressed or promoted” by the mainstream media, appearing to compare Britain to communist Russia. “This is the kind of thing that we used to see going on in the Soviet Union and it’s now happening to us and it is absolutely shocking that that is the case in modern Britain,” she said. “I do think this needs to be actively fought and what I am doing is establishing a new free speech network, which will be uncensored and uncancellable, to actually talk about the issues people don’t want to talk about.” Her attempt to create her own social media platform follows in the footsteps of Trump’s Truth Social, operated by the Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG). Investing in TMTG became a means by which individual investors showed their support for the US president. TMTG lost $400.9m (£303.5m) last year. The track record of UK political figures attempting to start their own social networks is not encouraging. The former health secretary Matt Hancock closed his Matt Hancock app in 2023, having launched it five years earlier to “promote a healthy, open and impartial debate”. The former Tory MP Louise Mensch launched an ill-fated competitor to Twitter called Menshn in 2012. It lasted less than a year, after she and her business partner fell out.