This Pew Research Center analysis provides data on Donald Trump’s Truth Social as he runs for president in 2024. It uses a multi-method approach on Truth Social and six other alternative social media sites (BitChute, Gab, Gettr, Parler, Rumble, Telegram) with publicly accessible posts and news media Sites that were mentioned and had at least 500,000 unique visitors in December 2021 were included in the study.
The survey portion of the study was conducted among 10,188 U.S. adults from May 16 to May 22, 2022. Everyone who completes the survey will become a member of the Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP). ATP is an online survey panel recruited through random sampling of residential addresses across the country. In this way, nearly every American adult has the opportunity to choose. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education, and other categories. Learn more about ATP’s methodology here. Respondents were asked about their level of familiarity with each of the seven social media sites surveyed. Those who said they had heard of these sites were also asked if they used them to get their news and what they thought about them.
The margin of sampling error for the total sample of 10,188 respondents is plus or minus 1.6 percentage points. The margin of sampling error for 587 Alternative Social Media News Consumers is plus or minus 7.0 percentage points. 219 Truth Social The margin of sampling error for news consumers is plus or minus 11.9 percentage points.
The audit of alternative social media sites was first conducted in April 2022. To conduct the analysis, a team of researchers was trained on a series of variables that examined characteristics of each site, such as privacy and moderation policies. The researchers re-examined each site from August 2022 to September (Truth Social was also re-examined in November 2022) and updated their findings if there were any changes.
The account content analysis examines a sample of 200 prominent accounts on each of the seven sites included in this analysis, for a total of 1,400 accounts. Prominent accounts were extracted from the 5% of accounts with the most followers on each site. A team of trained researchers analyzed a sample of 1,400 of his accounts to determine who ran the accounts, their political orientation, values, and other characteristics. Please read our methodology to learn more about how accounts were identified and sampled.
Post content analysis examines the topics discussed and sources of citations in 585,470 posts published in June 2022 by a sample of 1,400 accounts (all of these accounts posted at least once that month). (Only 1,147 were registered). The researchers used a set of unique keywords to identify posts on five different topics. Guns, gun control and shootings. The attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6th. LGBTQ issues. And vaccines. The researchers looked at unique two- or three-word phrases commonly used in posts for each topic. The researchers then examined the unique domains linked in these posts to determine the types of sources these accounts were using.
The questions, detailed tables, and methodology used in the study are as follows:
The Pew Research Center is a subsidiary of its principal funder, the Pew Charitable Trusts. This is the latest report in the Pew Research Center’s ongoing investigation into the state of news, information and journalism in the digital age. This research program is funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts and receives generous support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.