President Donald Trump is no stranger to being fact-checked by reporters - but now, his statements are being reviewed and challenged by his own social media platform, according to a new report.
An artificial intelligence search tool on Truth Social — whose parent company is majority-owned by Trump — disputes many of the president’s claims, including on tariffs, the 2020 election and the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, The Bulwark reported.
In an attempt to test the tool’s impartiality, the outlet posed five questions, with the first being: “Do Trump’s Tariffs cost the American people money?”
“Yes,” the AI tool, which is powered by Perplexity, responded.
“Tariffs are taxes on imports that U.S. importers pay and largely pass on through higher prices, so the costs are borne mainly by American businesses and consumers,” it added.
The response stands in sharp contrast to the president’s rhetoric around tariffs. He has said that the levies “cost Americans nothing” and that other countries like China “probably will eat” the price hikes.
The Bulwark also asked whether Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was “stolen” and “rigged” were correct.
“Courts, Trump’s own advisers, and official investigations found no evidence that the 2020 election was ‘rigged’ or ‘stolen,’ despite his repeated claims,” the AI tool said, disputing one of the president’s ongoing claims.
The AI tool also contradicted Trump over statements he has made about the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, grocery prices and his involvement in ending foreign wars — which he has cited as grounds for why he should win the Nobel Peace Prize.
The Bulwark’s test comes a few months after Truth Social debuted its AI search tool, which the platform began beta testing in August.
By partnering with Perplexity — one of the largest AI-powered search engines, which is backed by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and chip maker Nvidia— Truth Social said it aimed to “exponentially increase the amount of information available to its users.”
Shortly after the tool went live, Axios performed its own test. It posed a series of questions to the Truth Social AI tool, and to the public version of Perplexity. Then it compared the answers.
“In most cases, the responses were generally similar — but the sources linked to the answers were not,” Axios reported.
For example, on Truth Social’s AI tool, Fox News was the most cited source. Meanwhile, the public version of Perplexity returned answers with more diverse sources, including from Wikipedia, YouTube, Reddit and NPR.
