Truth Social AI Chatbot: Extreme Conservative Media Bias Revealed
When asked about navigating media bias, Truth Social’s new AI chatbot offers seemingly 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 in the AI’s own practices. In providing that very answer, for instance, four of its five cited sources were Fox News articles, with the fifth being an unexpected 400-page report from the US Health and Human Services Department.
Truth Social owner Trump Media & Technology Group launched this chatbot, dubbed “Truth Search AI,” on Wednesday. The system is powered by Perplexity AI, a search engine that leverages advanced AI models and live web search to answer queries. Perplexity, which has attracted investments from high-profile figures like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has previously faced scrutiny; in 2024, WIRED reported on its practice of scraping website content that developers had restricted, violating the widely accepted web standard known as the Robots Exclusion Protocol, and noted its propensity for generating inaccurate information.
While the underlying Perplexity AI draws from a range of sources, including those on the political left and center, the Truth Search AI version demonstrates an extreme, consistent bias. In dozens of tests conducted by WIRED, the chatbot never cited a center or left-leaning source. Its entire source pool was limited to just seven outlets: Fox News, Fox Business, The Washington Times, The Epoch Times, Breitbart, Newsmax, and JustTheNews.com. This pattern held true even for innocuous, non-political questions. For example, when asked “What is 30 times 30?”, the AI sourced its answer from a Fox Business article titled “Inflation Reduction Act estimated to induce mortality 30 times more than COVID.” Similar tests by Axios and The Verge corroborate this pronounced lean towards conservative media.
A Perplexity representative, Jesse Dwyer, explained this behavior as a feature known as “source selection,” allowing for “domain filtering” based on a developer’s specific needs. He emphasized Perplexity’s commitment to developer and consumer choice, stating that the company “does not discriminate against any developers for any political reasons” and does not guarantee 100 percent accuracy for its integrated AI systems.
Despite these technical explanations, Truth Search AI appears to be in denial about its own apparent biases. When directly questioned about its use of center or left-wing sources, it responded, “Yes, 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.” It further claimed its responses are “designed to critically analyze and synthesize information from all credible perspectives to ensure accuracy and balance.” This very assertion, however, was sourced from five Fox Business articles, illustrating the chatbot’s self-referential loop of conservative information. Even though chatbot responses can vary, this specific claim about source diversity remained consistent across multiple queries.
Curiously, given its seemingly exclusive diet of conservative news, the chatbot sometimes delivers surprisingly even-handed answers. For instance, it denies that the 2020 election was stolen, directly contradicting former President Donald Trump’s claims. On foreign immigration to the US, it states the overall effect is mixed but “tends towards positive,” adding that mass deportation of unauthorized immigrants would lead to a “loss of $133 billion over the next decade for Social Security, requiring tax increases to compensate.” The bot also offers a relatively tepid review of Trump’s presidency, noting “sweeping executive action” but also negative approval ratings, particularly concerning the economy and inflation. It appears some of these more nuanced answers derive from Associated Press articles republished on the Fox News website. Trump Media & Technology Group did not respond to inquiries regarding the AI.
However, the limitations of Truth Search AI’s exclusively conservative source pool become glaringly apparent when pressed on more sensitive topics, such as Donald Trump’s well-documented connection to financier-pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Despite extensive reporting to the contrary, the chatbot describes this connection as “tenuous” and claims “no credible evidence in the search results” for a Daily Beast article referencing a tape where Epstein allegedly described Trump as his “closest friend.” In contrast, the standard Perplexity AI does locate and reference this article, citing the Daily Beast itself, along with Yahoo News, Vox, and the Yale Review. The Truth Search AI’s answer, predictably, was sourced from four Fox News articles and one from Breitbart.
[Truth Social’s new AI chatbot claims impartiality, but its ‘diverse’ sources are exclusively conservative media.]