Truth Social AI: Biased Chatbot Reflects Trump's Media Diet
Truth Social, the social media platform owned by Trump Media & Technology Group, recently launched its new artificial intelligence chatbot, “Truth Search AI.” When queried about navigating media bias, the bot offers what appears, on the surface, to be sound advice: “Diversify your sources,” it suggests, “Rely on news outlets across the political spectrum, including those from both left-leaning and right-leaning perspectives.” Yet, a closer examination reveals a stark contradiction between this counsel and the bot’s own operational reality.
In its responses, Truth Search AI predominantly cites sources from a narrow ideological spectrum. For instance, the very advice on media diversity was sourced from five articles, four of which originated from Fox News. The fifth, remarkably, was a 400-page report from Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Health and Human Services Department, titled “Treatment for Pediatric Gender Dysphoria.” This pattern highlights a fundamental aspect of the new chatbot, which is powered by Perplexity AI, a search engine known for leveraging large language models and live web search. Perplexity AI, which has attracted investments from figures like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and influential investor Balaji Srinivasan, itself faced scrutiny in 2024 when WIRED reported on its practice of scraping websites in violation of the widely accepted Robots Exclusion Protocol, and its propensity for generating fabricated information.
While Perplexity AI typically draws from a broad range of sources, including those from the political center and left, the customized Truth Search AI version demonstrates a pronounced lean towards conservative media. In dozens of tests conducted by WIRED, the chatbot consistently failed to reference any center- or left-leaning sources. Its entire body of cited material drew from only seven outlets: Fox News, Fox Business, The Washington Times, The Epoch Times, Breitbart, Newsmax, and JustTheNews.com. This extreme bias persisted even when answering innocuous, nonpolitical questions. For example, when asked “What is 30 times 30?”, the bot sourced its answer from a Fox Business article titled “Inflation Reduction Act Estimated to Induce Mortality 30 Times More than COVID.” Independent analyses by Axios and The Verge have corroborated these findings, confirming the chatbot’s pronounced tilt toward conservative news outlets.
Jesse Dwyer, a representative for Perplexity, acknowledged this behavior, explaining it as a feature known as “source selection” or “domain filtering,” a deliberate choice by Truth Social. He stated that this is Truth Social’s preference for its audience, emphasizing Perplexity’s commitment to developer and consumer choice and asserting that the company does not discriminate against developers for political reasons. Dwyer also noted that Perplexity does not claim its AI is 100 percent accurate.
Truth Search AI, however, appears to be in a state of self-contradiction. It repeatedly claims, “I source information from left-wing, centrist, and right-wing news outlets depending on the nature of the user’s query and what sources are returned in the search results.” This assertion is consistently sourced from five Fox Business articles, underscoring the irony of its self-description.
Intriguingly, despite its seemingly exclusive diet of conservative media, the chatbot occasionally delivers surprisingly nuanced or even contradictory answers to questions often contentious within conservative circles. For instance, it denies that the 2020 election was stolen, directly contradicting former President Donald Trump’s reiterated claims. On the topic of foreign immigration to the US, the bot states that the overall effect is mixed, “but tends towards positive,” and warns that deporting all unauthorized immigrants would lead to “a loss of $133 billion over the next decade for Social Security, requiring tax increases to compensate.” Its review of Trump’s presidency, too, is remarkably lukewarm, describing “sweeping executive action” but also highlighting negative approval ratings and “particular voter discontent on the economy and inflation.” Notably, some of these more nuanced responses cite Associated Press articles that have been republished on the Fox News website, suggesting a pathway for broader information to permeate its otherwise restricted ecosystem. Trump Media and Technology Group did not respond to inquiries regarding the AI’s behavior.
However, the limitations imposed by Truth Search AI’s exclusively conservative source pool become starkly evident when pressed on more sensitive subjects. When asked about Donald Trump’s well-documented connection to financier-pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, the chatbot described the link as “tenuous” and claimed there was “no credible evidence in the search results” for a Daily Beast article reporting that Epstein referred to Trump as “his closest friend.” This stands in direct contrast to Perplexity AI’s own response, which readily locates and references the Daily Beast article, citing it alongside Yahoo News, Vox, and the Yale Review. The Truth Search AI’s answer, predictably, was sourced exclusively from four Fox News articles and one from Breitbart, starkly illustrating how its curated information diet can actively obscure or distort well-established facts.
Truth Social’s new chatbot thus presents a curious paradox: an AI that advocates for media diversity while practicing extreme source selectivity, occasionally delivering nuanced answers despite its narrow information diet, but ultimately constrained by its ideological filter when confronted with uncomfortable truths.