Former President Donald Trump’s brand new Twitter-like social media platform promising to encourage free speech comes with an apparent irony – it appears to prohibit users from criticizing the person behind it.

Launched by Trump on Monday, Truth Social billed itself as a ‘platform that encourages an open, free, and honest global conversation without discriminating against political ideology’.

However, NPR reporter Bobby Allyn noticed an interesting term within a day of the platform going live.

‘I will note here that I checked out the app’s terms of service, and there is one thing that is prohibited on Truth Social: to “disparage, tarnish or otherwise harm” the backers of the site,’ Allyn reported on Tuesday.

‘I imagine that means Donald Trump.’

The terms of service page on Tuesday reportedly stated that users must agree to not ‘harass, intimidate, or threaten any of our employees or agents engaged in providing any portion of the Service to you’, according to the Daily Mail. That no longer appears on the online terms of service.

Already, users have been kicked off the platform for mocking Trump Media & Technology Group CEO Devin Nunes.

An account with the handle @DevinNunesCow that called Nunes an outgoing California representative was reportedly booted from Truth Social. The parody account may have inspired by Twitter user @DevinCow which casts itself as a cow owned by Nunes, who owns a dairy farm.

If Truth Social truly does ban users from disparaging Trump and his team, it stands counter to the ex-president’s promise that his platform would be a minimally censored alternative to Twitter and Facebook, which permanently banned him.

It remains unclear how Truth Social monitors content, but Fox Business reported that the company planned to use artificial intelligence from a Silicon Valley-based tech firm. Truth Social was set on ensuring the platform stayed ‘family-friendly’ while utilizing Big Tech software, according to the report in January.

Truth Social has been off to a rollercoaster start. It was nearly inaccessible at times with a 13-hour outage and technical glitches, but has also reaching the No 1 spot on the Apple’s App Store and amassed a 500,000-person waitlist and counting.

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