The shares of the cash-rich special purpose acquisition company that seeks to merge with former President Donald J. Trump’s social media company surged on Thursday after Google said it would allow Trump Media & Technology Group’s flagship product to appear in its app store.
The stock of that SPAC, Digital World Acquisition Corp., was up about 15 percent on Thursday, at one point reaching just over $19 a share. Shares of Digital World have come under pressure because of investigations by the Securities and Exchange Commission and federal prosecutors that threaten the completion of the deal.
The decision by Alphabet, Google’s parent company, to permit Trump Media’s Truth Social app to be downloaded from the Google Play Store was announced late Wednesday. The move was something of an about face for the tech giant, which had said it would not permit downloads of the Twitter-like social media app until it took steps to remove content that promoted violence.
But in a statement on Wednesday, Google said that an app was permitted onto the platform as long as it complied with guidelines “to effectively moderate user-generated content and remove objectionable posts such as those that incite violence.”
Truth Social has been available in Apple’s App Store for several months. When it debuted in February, it was briefly the App Store’s most popular download. Now, Google has opened up a whole new potential customer base for the upstart app.
In a statement, Devin Nunes, Trump Media’s chief executive officer, said Google’s decision “marks a significant milestone in our mission to restore free speech online.”
Truth Social and Trump Media were formed after Twitter decided to bar Mr. Trump from its platform after the Jan. 6 attack at the Capitol. Mr. Trump has accused Twitter of censoring conservative commentators and politicians.
Digital World is facing a Dec. 8 deadline to complete the merger with Trump Media. Otherwise it will be forced to liquidate and return to investors the nearly $300 million raised in the SPAC’s initial public offering.
Shares of Digital World had been sliding in recent days since the SPAC announced on Monday that it still needed more of its shareholders to approve a measure that would give both companies until next September to complete the planned deal.
The decision by Google is the first good news investors in the SPAC have had in a while.
The merger has been slowed by the federal investigations into potentially improper communications between representatives of the SPAC and Trump Media before Digital World’s public offering in September 2021. Authorities are also looking into unusual trading in Digital World securities that took place before the deal’s announcement last October.
