Trump shuns social media
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Trump shuns social media
The once digitally-savvy former President has replaced his mainstream social media presence with endless rants on Truth Social
In 2016, Donald Trump’s Facebook-focused campaign propelled him into the presidency, and in 2020, the reality star-turned-President again relied on mainstream social media platforms to reach his core audiences. This time around, however, the Trump campaign is shunning mainstream social media altogether and bizarrely choosing not to communicate with its tens of millions of followers on sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. In this week’s FWIW, we’ll break down the extent of Trump’s shocking online absence and why it matters. But first…
By the numbers
FWIW, political advertisers spent just over $9.1 million on Facebook and Instagram ads last week. These were the top ten spenders nationwide:
The Biden campaign continues to spend heavily on digital advertising, and they are now putting ad dollars behind last week’s viral Marjorie Taylor Greene video. According to one staffer at the DNC, it's “their highest raising fundraising ad since launching.“ Facebook’s Ad Library shows they’ve spent at least $65,000 on the ad in the past few days.
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ)’s campaign is running new Facebook fundraising ads featuring her speaking to elderly white people, which can only mean one thing: she is considering running for re-election.
The Sound of Freedom, a popular action movie about human trafficking that has gained steam on the Right, has spent over $10.1 million on Facebook ads this year. Facebook classifies the film’s promotional ads as “political or issue advertising,” since they feature language about government and human trafficking.
Meanwhile, political campaigns spent $1.1 million on Google and YouTube ads last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:
Defending Democracy Together / The Republican Accountability Project has spent thousands of dollars running an ad on Google & YouTube in recent weeks attacking Donald Trump for his mishandling of classified documents. The video is narrated by former CIA Director Michael Hayden and has received over 6.3 million views.
Virginia’s state legislative elections (slated for this November!) are heating up, with the House Republican Campaign Committee launching a slew of new Google and YouTube ads attacking Democratic candidates for the House of Delegates as too extreme.
…and on Snapchat, political campaigns and organizations in the United States have spent around $1.5 million on advertising in 2023. Here are the top ten spenders YTD:
Your 2024 digital dispatch
FWIW, here’s how much money likely or confirmed 2024 presidential candidates have spent on Facebook + Google ads to date (1/1 - 7/22):
Asa-mentum has hit a wall. Asa Hutchinson’s campaign and its affiliated Super PAC spent $0 on Facebook ads last week, despite still needing to find new donors to make next month’s RNC debate stage.
Miami Mayor Francis Suarez continues to spin up clever schemes to try to inch closer to his fundraising goal for the debate. We hear that he may start selling knives door-to-door next.
According to the Washington Post, Team Biden is beefing up its data operation.
From around the internet
Tech journalist
breaks down new research on if and how Facebook shapes our political views.
A far-right member of Congress from Wisconsin may have gotten into a drunken altercation with teenagers in the U.S. Capitol building this week. His Wikipedia page was immediately updated, and it’s not looking great!
Meta’s Threads app has added a chronological / “following” feed. Hopefully this means a desktop version of the Twitter replica will soon be on the way.
Microsoft is banning political ads via its Xandr platform. A Democratic ads firm accused the company of “pulling the rug out from under American voters.”
Trump shuns social media
As we’ve noted before, Donald Trump is seemingly coasting in his bid to reclaim the GOP nomination for President next year. Yet unlike in 2016 and 2020, he’s doing so with an extremely limited social media presence.
It’s one of the most remarkable dynamics at play in this early stage of the 2024 election that has gone unmentioned in most political reporting to date. So far in 2023, the Trump campaign has posted on Facebook just 51 times, but at this same point in 2019, Trump had already shared 1,359 posts. The picture is the same on Instagram, where the President has only shared 60 feed posts this year compared to 565 at this same point in the 2020 election. While Twitter was once the President’s favorite online platform, he has yet to tweet or retweet content since being reinstated by owner Elon Musk.
We could go on and on - Trump has only posted on YouTube 31 times this year, and he’s not on TikTok or Snapchat, which are platforms used heavily by younger Americans.
It’s unclear to us why the former President and his campaign team have decided to disengage from mainstream social platforms in this manner. Despite algorithmic political content distribution declining on Facebook in recent years, Trump’s handful of posts still receive exceptionally high levels of engagement on that platform.
Tens of millions of Americans follow Donald Trump on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. By choosing not to engage them on those sites, his campaign is making an obvious mistake - and ceding much of the internet to his GOP rivals and Biden campaign.
However, there is one place online where Trump is spending a lot of time: his own social media site, Truth Social. He obsessively uses the platform and, by our count, has “truthed” or “re-truthed” at least 336 times in the past 7 days. That's an average of 48 posts per day.
The Trump campaign often uses that platform to share short (30-second to 2-minute) straight-to-camera videos in which he rants about President Biden, his GOP rivals, or his numerous legal problems. He’s already shared 12 such videos this week.
Just in the past week, his account has shared or reshared content about pedophilia, posts calling him “the new Moses”, general warnings of vengeance, a meme attacking the Republican Congress as “in on it”, AI-generated photos of Melania, posts about 2020 election fraud, and at least one post about a “deep state” plan to take out the leader of Pakistan.
It’s all so deranged.
Compared to sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, Truth Social has never had a serious user base. It’s really only a place where a few thousand Trump die-hards and a handful of curious journalists go to see his content. Most Republican politicians aren’t even on the site.
Meanwhile, Trump’s scaled-back social media presence has to come as welcome news to the Biden campaign, which is building momentum and capitalizing on key moments to distribute its content.
That’s it for FWIW this week! This email was sent to 16,248 readers. Help us reach more subscribers by forwarding this week’s issue to your colleagues!
Trump shuns social media
Interesting insights. Just out of curiosity, what are your criteria for considering Brian Kemp as a likely 2024 candidate? Thanks!
Do any of these brainwashed followers actually think the government "staged" this? If so, have they ever wonder why 1000s govt people are in jail wrongly? They were doing their job right?