Trump, Twitter, and Truth Social: how Trump used both mainstream and alt-tech social media to drive news media attention

ABSTRACT

Former President Donald Trump is well-known for dominating the attention-driven hybrid media system through his controversial tweets, which spurred social media user engagement and news media attention. The removal of Trump from Twitter/X raises questions about his continued ability to drive news attention through his alt-tech platform, Truth Social. Our analysis shows that the retweets and “retruths” Trump gained predicted related news attention across the political spectrum. However, our results also point to shifts in news attention, including diminished direct embedding of his “truths,” a lower proportion of stories on his Truth Social activity among all stories about him, and greater partisan media attention to his Truth Social activity in 2022, as compared to 2016. These findings advance our understanding of Trump’s social media based communicative power, changing journalistic practices, and the place of alt-tech in the media system.

KEYWORDS:

• Social media
• alt-tech
• social media engagement
• news attention
• hybrid media
• attention economy

Acknowledgement

We thank our reviewers, David Karpf for the feedback on our manuscript, and Chris Wells for sharing the 2016 event data.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/19331681.2024.2328156

Notes

1. Twitter made a statement on January 8 2021 about Trump’s suspension. His Twitter account was restored on November 20, 2022, following Elon Musk’s purchase of the platform.

2. See “$2 Billion Worth of Free Media for Donald Trump” from the New York Times.

3. For comparison, in 2022, Twitter has over 400 million users, whereas Gab had 1.1 million registered accounts in 2020.

4. See “Marjorie Taylor Greene and Big Tech’s never-ending censorship loop” from Vox and “Twitter permanently bans Alex Jones, website Infowars” from Reuters.

5. See “Trump’s Truth Social Really Is a (Tiny, Conservative) Phenomenon” in New York Magazine.

6. See “Trump launches ‘From the desk of Donald J. Trump’ as potential Facebook ban looms” from USA Today.

7. See “Former U.S. president Donald Trump launches ‘TRUTH’ social media platform” from Reuters.

8. See “Exclusive: Trump’s Truth Social app set for release Monday in Apple App Store, per executive” from Reuters.

9. See “Truth Social’s Influence Grows Despite Its Business Problems” from the New York Times.

10. The GitHub archive can be located at https://github.com/bpb27/trump_tweet_data_archive. We checked that the data from this archive is the same as the Trump Twitter Archive.

11. Similar to their work on the American political media landscape during the 2016 election (Benkler, Faris, & Roberts, 2018), Faris and a team at the Berkman Klein Center analyzed about 15,000 Twitter users active between January and June 2019 who self-identified as liberal/democrat or conservative/republican in their profile. They collected links shared by these users, assigned them a score (on a −1 to 1 scale) based on how frequently people on the left or right linked to them, and sorted the domains into five collections based on whether accounts on the left or right tweeted them significantly more often than the other side, somewhat more often, or evenly (Faris et al., 2020).

12. Our stringent measure quantifies direct embedding. Embedding a Twitter or Truth Social post requires a snippet of html that includes the username. If a page lacks a username, it lacks the embed code. Our broader measure of attention to Trump’s Twitter or Truth Social activity includes not only direct embedding, but also mentioning Trump and Twitter/Truth Social together in some other fashion, whether quoting him, paraphrasing, or something else.

13. See “Trump reports little income from Truth Social, $1 M from NFTs” from the Associated Press.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yini Zhang

Yini Zhang (Ph.D. University of Wisconsin-Madison) is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. She studies social media, media system, and political communication, using computational methods.

Josephine Lukito

Josephine (“Jo”) Lukito (Ph.D. University of Wisconsin-Madison) is an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Journalism and Media and Director of the Media and Democracy Data Cooperative. She is also a Senior Faculty Research Affiliate for the Center for Media Engagement.

Jiyoun Suk

Jiyoun Suk (Ph.D. University of Wisconsin-Madison) is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Connecticut. She studies the role of networked communication in shaping social trust, activism, and polarization, using computational methods.

Ryan McGrady

Ryan McGrady (Ph.D. North Carolina State University) is a researcher with Media Cloud, the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure, and the Media Ecosystems Analysis Group, based at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.