Retruth Reconnaissance: A Digital Forensic Analysis of Truth Social

Truth Social is a social media platform founded by former President Donald J. Trump as an alternative to mainstream social media platforms. Like other alt-tech social media, such as Parler or MeWe, Truth Social’s looser content moderation rules may encourage more extreme user-based content. This includes biased language- posts with racist, sexist, ableist, or other discriminatory intent- and calls for violence. Digital forensic analysis can be useful in such cases, where law enforcement seeks to prevent or investigate extremist threats associated with a platform. This research fills a gap in the extant literature by offering a novel forensic analysis of Truth Social, based on established techniques. First, using mobile devices, account and application metadata was discovered. Next, network traffic analysis using a desktop computer revealed plaintext usernames and passwords. A detailed depiction of the forensic analysis performed for this paper is presented to aid future investigators.