Department of Communication's Yini Zhang, Assistant Professor, was a guest on the BBC: The Media Show to discuss the impact of Donald Trump’s social media platform, Truth Social, on news coverage in the U.S. Zhang has published research looking at Truth Social’s ability to drive news attention in the 2020 presidential election compared with Trump’s similar use of Twitter in the run-up to the 2016 election. “Truth Social was almost as effective as Twitter in terms of driving news attention to Trump and his social media activity,” said Zhang. “But Truth Social was not as effective compared to Twitter in the sense that in the midterm election cycle journalists stopped directly embedding Trump’s Truth Social posts in news stories on their websites. The number of such stories is actually orders magnitude smaller than the number of stories that embedded his Tweets back in 2016.”

Listen to the episode on BBC: The Media Show.