AP Photo/Alex Brandon
Former President Donald Trump’s social media platform, Truth Social, scored its biggest digital audience in July since its launch in 2022.
According to new Comscore data from the media tracking website TheRighting, Truth Social’s monthly year-over-year traffic surged 136% from July 2023 to 5.67 million unique visitors – the site’s biggest audience since it launched in February of 2022. Truth Social itself has grabbed headlines in recent weeks, both as its parent company’s stock price has continued to plummet and as Trump continues to post wild screeds and memes – most recently suggesting “military tribunals” for his political opponents.
Howard Polskin, the president of TheRighting, attributed the traffic gain to the chaotic and eyeball-grabbing news cycle, which focused on Trump and the 2024 election. “An earthquake rumbled through the national political terrain in July after the assassination attempt on Donald Trump and President Biden dropped out of the presidential race. Those two dramatic events drew audiences back to news websites, reversing a year-long trend,” said Polskin.
The Truth Social traffic bump coincided with a surge in clicks for some right-wing media outlets as well. Hard right conspiracy website The Gateway Pundit saw its traffic balloon 304% in July from the same month the year before, while the Daily Signal and The Washington Times increased their audiences some 273% and 149% – respectively.
The leader of the right-of-center media environment, Fox News, gained 26% year over year in July. While most sites saw increases, The Washington Examiner, The Epoch Times, and TheBlaze all dropped in traffic.
Polskin noted that the gains were the first for the majority of right-wing websites in 2024, which had been seeing a steady erosion in their digital audiences. “The audience levels are still down from four years ago, but the audience erosion was halted for at least a month,” Polskin noted.
Digital readership remains down this election cycle compared to 2020 across the board. CNN, the digital leader in news, is down 16% in July 2024 (131,793,000) compared to July 2020 (156,193,000). Fox News is down slightly less, some 15%, with 93,921,000 unique visitors this Juy compared to 110,372,000 in July of 2020.
Read TheRighting’s full July data set here.
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