Is it ok to just ignore Truth Social?

A dilemma.

Every few days, I open up the Truth Social app on my phone and scroll through Donald Trump’s latest “truths.”

What I am continually taken by is:

• How many times he posts in a day

• The extreme things he says

For example, in just the last 24 hours, Trump has posted on Truth Social that a) his current status as the Republican frontrunner in 2024 will lead the “Injustice Department” to target him b) he only used folders marked “classified” at Mar-a-Lago because they were “momentous” c) the United States is a “THIRD WORLD NATION,” and d) MSNBC has “REALLY BAD RATINGS.”

And, every single time I look at Truth Social think to myself: Should I be looking at this more? Or even less?

On the one hand, Trump is the only announced candidate for president in 2024. And polling suggests he is the race’s frontrunner. And Truth Social, the social media site he started after leaving the White House is his preferred method of communication these days.

At the same time, Truth Social is on the very small end of social media sites. As of November 2022, only 1 in 4 people (27%) had even heard of the site and a meager 2% used it to get their news, according to data from Pew.

Trump has 4.9 million followers on the site — a far cry from the 87.6 million followers he has on Twitter. (Trump’s Twitter ban was lifted in late 2022 but he has yet to use it again, preferring to stay on Truth Social.)

The Twitter comp is worth digging deeper into. Throughout the 2016 campaign — and during his time in the White House — Trump used Twitter as a sort of public diary. He would rant on it when he was angry. He would use it to lavish praise on those who had served him loyally. He would comment on the news — a lot.

I — and my colleagues in the mainstream media — covered Trump’s every utterance on Twitter. What he said drove news cycles, framed debate questions and generally carried a heavy influence over how he (and politics more broadly) was covered.

In the early days of that 2016 race, I was reacting to every tweet Trump sent — almost. If I wrote four pieces a day, three of them were about Trump and most of them were launched or influenced by a tweet from the billionaire businessman.

I justified it to myself this way: Trump was rapidly rising in the polls and so what he said mattered. So, I covered it.

There was, of course, more there. Trump content succeeded online — and so I was incentivized to write more of it. (The media is a business whether you like it or not.)

But it wasn’t just that. What he was saying and doing was SO outlandish, SO out there, SO, well, unpresidential, that is was hard to look away. Trump had (and has) a tremendous ability to say and do things that make news (often in a bad way) and I was attracted to that like a lightning bug to a zapper.

Trump himself had admitted the centrality of Twitter to his 2016 victory.

“I doubt I would be here if it weren’t for social media, to be honest with you,” he told Fox Business in October 2017. “Tweeting is like a typewriter — when I put it out, you put it immediately on your show. When somebody says something about me, I am able to go bing, bing, bing and I take care of it. The other way, I would never be get the word out.”

All of which brings me back to Truth Social — and the 2024 campaign. Not only does Trump appear to be using the same public diary approach with it that he used with Twitter in 2016 and 2020 but, to complicate matters even further, Trump has a significant financial stake in the website.

Which means that if you write about Trump’s Truth Social posts, you are, in a way, promoting Trump’s business interests too.

How have most mainstream outlets handled the challenge thus far? There’s been no one-size-fits-all approach but, generally speaking, I have seen stories quote a line or two from a Trump Truth Social post as part of a broader narrative. That is, there aren’t stories being built around what Trump says on Truth Social. Not even close.

Which, I think, is the right approach. Truth Social has a decidedly limited reach. Writing extensively about what Trump posts on the site then has a magnifying effect — giving his thoughts far more reach than they otherwise might enjoy.

The question for us in the media is whether we can stick by that policy — especially as the primary season heats up.

If Trump, as he has pledged to do, stays with Truth Social as his primary method of communicating on a daily basis, it is impossible, journalistically, to ignore it (and him) entirely.

The key, I think, is to be aware of what Trump is posting on Truth Social but not be lured into always writing about it. So much of what Trump does is for shock value or to deflect from some other storyline he believes to be bad for him. The relative news value is often quite low.

In order to properly cover him (and contextualize what he is writing on Truth Social), we in the media need to be aware of his puppeteer tendencies and not let him dictate what the coverage looks like on a given day, week or month.

Again, I don’t think that means we can ignore entirely what he writes on Truth Social It’s part of his public pitch to voters. But, given it’s limited reach, it’s a very small part — and we need to cover it accordingly.