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

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.17901v1
• Date: Wed, 18 Mar 2026 16:35:10 GMT
• Title: Grievance Politics vs. Policy Debates: A Cross-Platform Analysis of Conservative Discourse on Truth Social and Reddit
• Abstract summary: We analyze Truth Social and the most popular conservative Reddit communities, r/Conservative, r/conservatives, and r/Republican.<n>We find clear contrasts: Truth Social centers on grievance and narrative-driven content, while Reddit focuses more on policy debates.<n>Our findings contribute to understanding how alternative right-leaning platforms reshape online discourse.
• Score: 5.492825288978256
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: 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.

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