I spent a week on Truth Social — and my head’s still spinning

Inforgraphic by Beverly Xu

After spending a week on the platform, this collage encompasses some of my favorite, ridiculously ironic Truth Social memes

After Twitter, now known as X, unmagnanimously (very very big word meaning ungraciously) banned former president Donald Trump from the platform, Trump took matters into his own hands. He created his own platform that provides a community for country-defending militia members who exercised their First and Second Amendment rights on January 6th (January 6th? What’s that?), as well as “right”-wing supporters and other anti-Antifa people. 

And what is its winning name? Truth Social. 

Now I hope that you can already tell that I’m kidding — unlike die-hard Trump fanatics, I do not believe that January 6 was an insurrection by Antifa members, that Trump won the 2020 presidential election or that Democrats are a part of a secret society of pedophile blood-suckers — so instead, I decided to dive into a world of people who do: the world of Truth Social. 

I looked forward to raging conspiracy theorists, signups for “gun get-togethers” and Fox-ified explanations of current news. So to preview what I was getting myself into before committing to clicking the signup button, I did some background research and learned two key points about the app.

First of all, Truth Social, despite its branding as a nonpartisan platform, largely caters to pro-Trump and Republican users: Pew Research Center reports that nearly half of top accounts by following on Truth Social openly identify as pro-Trump or right-leaning. Even more staggeringly, Pew revealed that two-thirds of users of the alternative social media sites in the study, including Truth Social, are Republican. Secondly, the app is intended to mimic Twitter and Facebook (both of which banned Trump in 2021), but without censorship; after being barred from the Google Play Store and Apple App Store for inciting violence, the company was forced to place some basic censors.

After finishing the background research, the first order of business was to determine my username. After crowdsourcing names from my friends, I took inspiration from the “stop” suggested as a joke and expanded it to “stopthesteal_2023.” First step to blending in as a Trump fangirl — check.

Logging into the app, I was given a list of high profile Truth Social users. On the very top of that list, of course, was the creator: @realDonaldTrump. Scrolling down, I encountered some other defining faces of the Republican party: MyPillow founder Mike Lindell, Sean Hannity, Donald Trump Jr. and — drumroll please — @catturd2, the Twitter right-wing political heckler. 

Unsurprisingly, there were also a number of conspiracist and pro-Trump politicians like representative Marjorie Taylor Greene and House speaker Kevin McCathy, who still insists that he cannot pronounce QAnon, which is apparently supposed to prove his dissociation from the conservative conspiracy theory.

However, I was surprised to not see most Republicans representatives and senators or quotes from news agencies like Fox News. Instead, posters cited right-wing news sites like Newsmax and forums like Quora to support their claims, giving me the impression that maybe, just maybe, what these users claim on Truth Social is a bit far from the truth …

Of course, the platform was overflowing with claims of voter fraud, rioting (and buying the needed guns and ammunition from Costco?). But by far the most popular topic was how president Joe Biden — or more commonly called “Creepy Joe” within the app — loves sniffing children. Every other post led me to a YouTube compilation of Biden’s head suspiciously surfacing behind the figures of various children, such damning evidence of the president’s disgusting hobby that a few users even claimed he preferred children over ice cream. These baseless claims, of course, met no opposition on the platform, nor was there a mention of Trump’s four indictments and more than 90 felony charges he faces in state and federal courts. 

I also took the liberty of replying to a few Truth Social posters through the lens of a pro-Trump, pro-QAnon, pro-MyPillow-Guy user. For example, when one user claimed that he “asked AI” about how Trump could have lost the presidential race after getting a record number of votes, I replied: “I completely agree! I did my duty as an informed citizen and also asked AI how many votes Biden got in 2020; it told me he got 80 million when Trump got 76 million!! The big tech companies must be colluding with Biden to switch the numbers, because there is no way Trump lost!” 

That user then went on to agree with me vehemently, telling me that “it’s actually pretty easy to get AI to flat out lie to you.” I don’t think he saw the irony.

Overall, the platform fell short of my expectations of an established Republican official hotspot, with few notable Republicans other than Trump’s own family members. Scrolling through the posts and comments, I was more witness to the cross-section of a chronically online Trump supporter’s brain, rather than just Republican Twitter. It felt more like just another conspiracy forum stringing buzzwords together — claiming that Biden is a vampire, Hillary emailed Hunter Biden’s laptop and Trump won the last election. 

But on a more serious note, the messages and posts that the half a million Truth Social users share paint a stark picture of what another Trump presidency might look like, as he remains in the 2024 presidential race and might be the Republican nominee. Unsettlingly, the Trump supporters on the platform show a blatant disregard for evidence that contradicts their conspiracy theories. The Truth Social community illustrates the irreparable divide in communication between Trump supporters and the rest of U.S. voters.