Grievance Politics vs. Policy Debates: A Cross-Platform Analysis of Conservative Discourse on Truth Social and Reddit

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Wang, Yining, Abdellatif, Alhasan, Deligianni, Artemis, Hok, Hannah, Cetinkaya, Yusuf Mucahit, Elmas, Tugrulcan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866912973039075328
author Wang, Yining
Abdellatif, Alhasan
Deligianni, Artemis
Hok, Hannah
Cetinkaya, Yusuf Mucahit
Elmas, Tugrulcan
author_facet Wang, Yining
Abdellatif, Alhasan
Deligianni, Artemis
Hok, Hannah
Cetinkaya, Yusuf Mucahit
Elmas, Tugrulcan
contents We present the first large-scale comparative analysis of Truth Social and the most popular conservative Reddit communities, r/Conservative, r/conservatives, and r/Republican. Using topic modeling with FASTopic and LLM-assisted refinement, we analyze topic prevalence, toxicity, and temporal dynamics across these communities during the first eight months of Truth Social. We find clear contrasts: Truth Social centers on grievance and narrative-driven content, while Reddit focuses more on policy debates. Toxicity is higher on Reddit and peaks in cultural and leader-focused topics. Despite similar event-driven participation shocks across platforms, Truth Social shows higher baseline proportions of users engaging with political topics. Our findings contribute to understanding how alternative right-leaning platforms reshape online discourse.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_17901
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Grievance Politics vs. Policy Debates: A Cross-Platform Analysis of Conservative Discourse on Truth Social and Reddit
Wang, Yining
Abdellatif, Alhasan
Deligianni, Artemis
Hok, Hannah
Cetinkaya, Yusuf Mucahit
Elmas, Tugrulcan
Social and Information Networks
Computers and Society
We present the first large-scale comparative analysis of Truth Social and the most popular conservative Reddit communities, r/Conservative, r/conservatives, and r/Republican. Using topic modeling with FASTopic and LLM-assisted refinement, we analyze topic prevalence, toxicity, and temporal dynamics across these communities during the first eight months of Truth Social. We find clear contrasts: Truth Social centers on grievance and narrative-driven content, while Reddit focuses more on policy debates. Toxicity is higher on Reddit and peaks in cultural and leader-focused topics. Despite similar event-driven participation shocks across platforms, Truth Social shows higher baseline proportions of users engaging with political topics. Our findings contribute to understanding how alternative right-leaning platforms reshape online discourse.
title Grievance Politics vs. Policy Debates: A Cross-Platform Analysis of Conservative Discourse on Truth Social and Reddit
topic Social and Information Networks
Computers and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.17901