Workshop Proceedings of the 18th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media
Workshop: Disrupt, Ally, Resist, Embrace (DARE) 2024: Action Items for Computational Social Scientists in a Changing World
DOI: 10.36190/2024.17There is a prevailing perception that content on a social media platform generally have the same political leaning. These platforms are often viewed as ideologically congruent entities, reflecting the majority opinion of their users; a prime example of this is Truth Social. While this perception may exist, it is essential to verify the platform's credibility, acknowledging that such platforms contain meaningful insights with neutral stances. To this end, we examine the dissemination of Wikipedia links on the alt-right platform, Truth Social. Wikipedia is recognized for enforcing content neutral- ity and serves as a unique lens to analyze the objectivity of user-generated content on Truth Social. By scrutiniz- ing Truths with and without Wikipedia links, identify- ing toxicity trends & recognizing coordinated networks, we observe a lower level of engagement and a tendency for Truths shared on Truth Social to cover more neutral topics when it includes Wikipedia links (Wiki Truths). Given the significantly different engagement and na- ture of content shared of Wiki Truths against Non-Wiki Truths, we emphasize that we should not generalize the techno-political affiliation of a social media platform, but rather should investigate the content closely.