Truth Social Dataset (2303.11240v1)

Abstract: Formally announced to the public following former President Donald Trump's bans and suspensions from mainstream social networks in early 2022 after his role in the January 6 Capitol Riots, Truth Social was launched as an "alternative" social media platform that claims to be a refuge for free speech, offering a platform for those disaffected by the content moderation policies of the existing, mainstream social networks. The subsequent rise of Truth Social has been driven largely by hard-line supporters of the former president as well as those affected by the content moderation of other social networks. These distinct qualities combined with its status as the main mouthpiece of the former president positions Truth Social as a particularly influential social media platform and give rise to several research questions. However, outside of a handful of news reports, little is known about the new social media platform partially due to a lack of well-curated data. In the current work, we describe a dataset of over 823,000 posts to Truth Social and and social network with over 454,000 distinct users. In addition to the dataset itself, we also present some basic analysis of its content, certain temporal features, and its network.