Gendered Communication Patterns of Political Elites on Truth Social

2026-03-24

AI Summary

This study investigates how gender shapes online communication patterns of political elites on Truth Social, an alternative technology platform, thereby addressing a critical gap in gendered communication research beyond mainstream social media. Drawing on a corpus of 107,000 posts from 129 U.S. political figures, the research employs computational social science methods—including large-scale text analysis, sentiment computation, and discursive frame detection—to reveal that gendered communication on this platform, characterized by right-wing extremism and hegemonic masculinity, exhibits both continuity and strategic adaptation. Female political elites express less anger, convey more joy, and deploy fear appeals more frequently than their male counterparts. Despite substantial overlap in issue coverage with men, they achieve significantly higher audience engagement, underscoring the platform-specific mechanisms of gendered expression and their communicative efficacy.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Natural Language Processing: Discourse, Pragmatics & Argument Mining
• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Social Choice / Voting

Application Category

• Social Networks and Social Media: Media and governance, opinion dynamics, filter bubbles, polarization
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Trust and reliance of crowd workers and data experts on GenAI
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Sentiment analysis and opinion mining

Abstract

The influence of gender on online political communication remains contested, with existing scholarship providing mixed evidence as to whether gender shapes political messaging in digital environments. However, this debate has largely centred on mainstream platforms such as X (formerly Twitter), leaving the dynamics of alt-tech social media underexamined. This paper addresses this gap by analysing gendered patterns of political communication on Truth Social, a hyper-partisan platform that functions as a hub for the most committed followers of the American far right, a community closely associated with hegemonic masculine norms. To address this gap, we present the first large-scale analysis of political elite communication on Truth Social, using a novel dataset of 107k posts from 129 U.S. political figures. We examine the extent to which gender influences rhetorical style, topic framing, and audience engagement. We find that many gendered communication patterns documented on mainstream platforms persist on Truth Social. In particular, women political elites tend to express more joy and less anger than men and receive significantly higher levels of audience engagement. At the same time, more nuanced differences emerge. Although men and women political elites discuss largely similar conservative themes, they differ in how these issues are framed and in the rhetorical strategies employed. Notably, posts associated with women political elites contain higher levels of fear-based rhetoric, potentially suggesting selective adaptation in communicative style to navigate gender norms on the platform. These findings suggest that on Truth Social, an alt-tech platform with distinct ideological characteristics, mainstream gendered constraints persist, but are expressed through platform-specific communicative patterns shaped by its partisan orientation and sociotechnical environment.

Problem

• gendered communication
• political elites
• Truth Social
• alt-tech
• online political discourse

Innovation

• gendered communication
• alt-tech platforms
• Truth Social
• political elites
• rhetorical framing