“Places like Twitter don’t have very many people,” Nunes said on The Federalist Radio Hour podcast Thursday. “There’s just not very many real people if you have bot farms, left-wing bot farms, spam accounts, corporate accounts, and then you have a lot of dead accounts.”

Nunes, who left Congress in January to spearhead former President Donald Trump’s free speech-branded alternative, said Twitter likely always concealed its true number of customers in the U.S. while making comparatively little money for a major tech giant.

“My guess is that whatever your follower amount is, it’s much lower than that. Those people just aren’t on the platform,” Nunes said. On top of shadow banning, Twitter’s influence beyond its activist users is on the decline.

The ex-lawmaker welcomed billionaire Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, explaining Truth Social is meant to be a different platform while the competition places pressure on incumbent tech oligarchs to open up the internet.

“If more billionaires want to come around and buy up these other companies, we’re all for it,” Nunes said. “But I just don’t see, you know, any minute that — despite what the fake news says and the narratives that they’re trying to write — any minute that I spend worried about Twitter, that’s a ghost town with no people, is a waste of time for the company.”

Users on Truth Social, Nunes added, “even in our nascent stage,” already routinely garnered more engagement than on rival platforms dominated by Silicon Valley.

Musk struck a deal to purchase Twitter for $44 billion, paying a 38 percent premium above the company’s share price in April. The founder of SpaceX and CEO of Tesla revealed Friday morning the deal was “temporarily on hold” but remains “still committed to acquisition” despite the setback.

Musk linked to an article from Reuters in the Friday post highlighting that only less than 5 percent of users on the platform were fake or spam accounts. That number, however, doesn’t include inactive accounts.

On Truth Social, Trump called the purchase a “ridiculous price” for a platform “largely based on BOTS or Spam Accounts.”

“By the time you get rid of them, if that can even be done, what do you have?” Trump wrote on his own service. “If it weren’t for the ridiculous Billion Dollar breakup fee, Elon would have already been long gone. Just my opinion, but Truth Social is MUCH better than Twitter and is absolutely exploding, incredible engagement!”