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

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.

Figures (11)

• Figure 1: Distribution of posts per user across Truth Social and conservative Reddit communities (logarithmic scale).
• Figure 2: TQ & reconstruction loss vs. number of topics ($K$).
• Figure 3: Topic share by platform relative to the expected Truth Social share (40%, vertical line). Label styles denote category: Red (Grievance), Bold (Policy), and Plain (Other).
• Figure 4: Temporal dynamics of document volume across four topics.
• Figure 5: Mean toxicity scores across platforms.