Trump’s Truth Social network records second-worst audience decline

Donald Trump's Truth Social platform experienced a third straight month of audience decline in June, a leading analyst of rightwing media said, detecting signs of "trouble at the ballot box" for the Republican presidential nominee.

"The diminishing audience levels for Truth Social suggest a rejection of the harsh rhetoric expressed by the ex-president and his political allies that is one of the hallmarks of the two-year-old platform," Howard Polskin said.

"If this softness persists, it might portend trouble for Mr Trump at the ballot box in November."

Polskin is president of TheRighting, a site that seeks to "inform middle-of-the-road and liberal audiences about stories and viewpoints not on their radar that are shaping political opinion across a wide swath of America".

Trump launched Truth Social in February 2022, after being kicked off X, then known as Twitter, and other major platforms for inciting the deadly attack on Congress on 6 January 2021.

He has since regained access to major platforms but continued to use Truth Social as his main political mouthpiece, through a campaign featuring repeated lies about electoral fraud, criminal conviction in New York, ongoing criminal cases elsewhere, multimillion-dollar fines in multiple civil cases, and an assassination attempt at a Pennsylvania rally.

All the while, the share price of Truth Social's parent company, Trump Media & Technology Group, has fluctuated widely.

Truth Social had 3.26 million unique users in its first month online, according to TheRighting. This June, per their analysis, the site had a little over 2.11 million unique users, a fall of 38% year on year.

Comparing Truth Social with other rightwing platforms, TheRighting said Rumble had 6.37 million unique users in June 2024, down 43% year on year, while Gettr had 134,000, down 34%.

The site also released figures for rightwing media sites, comparing unique visitor figures from June 2020 and June 2024. Fox News, the clear frontrunner, was down 26%, from 107.3 million to 79.6 million.

Polskin said: "The ongoing audience erosion in June 2024 was expected because June 2020 was dominated by big news events like the civil unrest following the murder of George Floyd [by police in Minneapolis] and the global health crisis triggered by the spread of Covid-19."

According to TheRighting, rightwing sites mostly showed smaller audience falls between June 2023 and June 2024. Figures for mainstream and liberal sites followed similar patterns.

For Truth Social and other sites, the picture may be about to change.

This year, July brought a string of huge news events, including the failed attempt to kill Trump, a raucous Republican convention, Joe Biden's decision to step aside as the Democratic presidential nominee and the rise of his replacement, Kamala Harris.

Such events "should provide a much-needed boost to the traffic for news outlets on both sides of the aisle", Polskin said. "However, if traffic continues to drop, it would signal intensifying challenges facing all news websites."