Disinformation Report: May 16-31
Updated: Oct 4
Including TX and CA
Ken Paxton’s Texas Win, the AB Hernandez Track Flashpoint, and Stephen Miller’s Disinformation Escalation
On May 26, Ken Paxton defeated incumbent Senator John Cornyn in the Texas Republican Senate runoff and opened the general election by calling the Democratic nominee, James Talarico, a “vegan who thinks God is nonbinary.” White House official Stephen Miller then told nine million people — falsely — that Texas Democrats had nominated “their first transgender senate candidate.” Days later, two California governor candidates turned a high-school track meet, where trans athlete AB Hernandez won two events, into rival campaign stages. Trans issues were not a side-skirmish this period; they were the explicit center of two marquee races.
May 16 – May 31, 2026
Data: Trans Rhetoric Social Media Dashboard
75K+ channels | 14 platforms | 940K+ posts
16,520 posts | 5,965 entities | 14 platforms | 315.8M engagements
Topline Finding
This was the fortnight trans issues moved to the front of the campaign. On May 26, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton beat incumbent Senator John Cornyn in the Republican Senate runoff and, in the same victory speech, defined his Democratic opponent James Talarico almost entirely through gender and faith — “a vegan who thinks God is nonbinary” who “loves trans kids.” Sitting senators (Mike Lee, John Barrasso, Bernie Moreno) consolidated behind the line within hours, and on May 27 the conversation exploded to 36.5M right-side engagements. The escalation went to the top: White House official Stephen Miller drew 9.7M engagements on a single false claim that Texas Democrats had nominated “their first transgender senate candidate” — Talarico is not transgender. Three days later the race for California governor produced the mirror image. Democrat Tom Steyer filmed himself encouraging trans high-school athlete AB Hernandez (“so proud of you for competing”) before the CIF state track championships, where she won two events; Republican Steve Hilton staged a “Save Girls’ Sports” protest at the meet and ran on it. Steyer’s own footage became the right’s most-shared weapon against him — on sports, the issue where the affirming position polls worst. The single biggest day (May 20, 57.2M) was inflated by mourning for the late Barney Frank rather than the trans fight itself. Net of that noise, the right out-engaged the left two-to-one and held a 1.59 performance score — elevated and steady, with right-side engagement rising week over week (71.6M → 102.6M) as the left’s fell (56.9M → 43.5M).
Source: Trans Rhetoric Social Media Dashboard
Key Findings
Trans issues became explicit campaign weaponry in two marquee races. The Texas Senate runoff and the California governor’s race both put trans at the center of candidate messaging this period — Paxton’s “God is nonbinary” attack on Talarico, and the Steyer–Hilton collision over AB Hernandez. The elections topic cluster ran 12.7M engagements (policy+elections) on top of the case-study volume. This is the client’s priority signal: the right is now bundling trans into front-line electoral messaging, with discipline and officeholder amplification.
A senior White House official spread top-of-government disinformation. Stephen Miller’s claim that Texas Democrats nominated “their first transgender senate candidate” drew 9.7M engagements (34.7 score) — the highest-performing right-wing post of the second week. James Talarico is a cisgender man, a former teacher and seminary student. The fabrication traveled unchallenged at a scale no correction approached.
Right-wing performance held at 1.59 and engagement accelerated. Down only modestly from 1.70 in May 1–15, the right’s score stayed well above baseline and steady across both weeks (1.58 → 1.59). Right-side engagement grew 43% week over week (71.6M → 102.6M) while left-side engagement fell 24% (56.9M → 43.5M). The right ran 2.6 posts for every one on the left.
On sports, a Democrat leaning in handed the right its ammunition. Tom Steyer’s “so proud of you” video and “totally in favor of trans athletes” remarks drove the California conversation — but mostly as right-wing amplification of his own words. The single largest item (3.3M) was a bare clip of Steyer’s quote racking up passive views, not a measure of support. On the fairness-of-competition question, the affirming flag invites the fight on the right’s strongest terrain.
The left’s most effective content let the right tell on itself. Brut’s resurfaced clip of an Arkansas state senator demanding a trans woman describe her genitalia drew 8.9M engagements at a 6.82 score — the left’s best-performing original of the period. The pattern repeats from prior cycles: amplifying the opponent’s cruelty outperforms earnest rebuttal.
Archive-as-visibility remained the left’s volume workhorse. PinkNews ran 17.8M engagements across 31 posts, led by archival footage of Rep. Sarah McBride being deliberately misgendered (6.7M) and a Graham Norton Show segment with trans actor Zoe Terakes (3.6M). Celebratory and archival framing, not defensive policy content, carried the left’s reach.
Celebrity-and-family trans stories were a recurring right vector. Oli London’s post on Jennifer Lopez’s child coming out as trans (3.9M) and Disclose.tv’s on Rihanna casting Elon Musk’s trans daughter (3.1M) show the right mining famous families for trans-content moments that travel outside the policy frame. The single biggest day (May 20) was driven not by the trans fight but by mourning for the late Barney Frank (Obama, 27.0M) — counted in our totals, but not a trans-rhetoric event.
The Data at a Glance
Understanding the Metrics
Engagements measure total interactions — likes, comments, shares, and reactions — across all platforms. The performance score compares how trans content performs versus an account’s other content: 1.0 means trans posts perform at that account’s baseline, above 1.0 means trans content outperforms, below 1.0 means it underperforms. Aggregate scores are winsorized at the 99th percentile to limit distortion from small-baseline outliers.
Data Source: Trans Rhetoric Social Media Dashboard
This report is powered by the Trans Rhetoric Social Media Dashboard, a proprietary monitoring tool custom-built for TFA that tracks anti-trans discourse at scale. The Dashboard monitors 75,000+ channels across 20 platforms — including fringe platforms like Telegram, Truth Social, GETTR, and Substack where some of the most extreme rhetoric originates — drawing from a database of 940,000+ posts spanning January 2024 to present.
Source: Trans Rhetoric Social Media Dashboard
Three of the four engagement peaks were election or campaign events. May 27 (45.3M) was the day after Paxton’s runoff win, the biggest right-side day of the period (36.5M right). May 31 (30.9M) was the CIF championship weekend and the eve of Pride. May 20 (57.2M) was the largest day by total volume, but most of it — led by the Obama/Barney Frank tribute (27.0M) — sits outside the live trans-policy fight. The May 17 neutral spike was Pop Base’s recognition of IDAHOBIT (the International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia), 10.9M.
Volume Breakdown
Political Lean | Posts | Entities | Engagements | Score | % of Eng. |
Right-Leaning | 10,327 | 2,968 | 174.1M | 1.59 | 55% |
Left-Leaning | 3,997 | 1,740 | 100.4M | 1.43 | 32% |
Neutral | 337 | 180 | 25.9M | 1.77 | 8% |
Unclassified | 1,778 | 1,048 | 15.4M | 1.35 | 5% |
The right out-posted the left 2.6-to-1 (10,327 → 3,997) and out-engaged it 1.7-to-1 (174.1M → 100.4M), both leans above baseline. The left’s 100.4M looks closer than the fight actually was: a single post — Barack Obama’s tribute to the late Barney Frank — contributed 27.0M of it at a 0.43 score, well below baseline, because it is mourning rather than trans-issue content. Strip that one post and the left’s engaged total falls below 75M. Neutral content punched above its volume (337 posts, 25.9M) on the strength of Pop Base’s IDAHOBIT recognition and straight wire coverage of the Texas and California races.
Platform Breakdown
Platform | Posts | Engagements | Avg/Post | Score | % Eng. |
9,856 | 237.2M | 24,062 | 1.77 | 75% | |
TikTok | 250 | 41.7M | 166,882 | 0.90 | 13% |
1,064 | 13.5M | 12,697 | 0.88 | 4% | |
YouTube | 499 | 11.5M | 22,973 | 0.70 | 4% |
2,447 | 11.1M | 4,522 | 1.35 | 4% | |
Telegram | 537 | 427K | 794 | 1.05 | <1% |
Bluesky | 752 | 211K | 281 | 1.51 | <1% |
Truth Social | 307 | 130K | 424 | 0.96 | <1% |
Raw post volumes are partly a function of how many channels we monitor per platform; we track far more Twitter channels than TikTok channels, so cross-platform post-count comparisons reflect coverage as much as discourse intensity. Engagement and per-post average are better cross-platform measures. Instagram and Facebook each combine Direct + standard feeds.
Twitter/X carried 75% of all engagement — this remains an X-centric fight, and the platform where the right’s framing is least contested. TikTok’s per-post average (166,882) dwarfs every other platform: 250 posts produced 41.7M engagements, the left’s strongest lane (PinkNews, Brut). Bluesky shows the inverse — 752 posts, only 211K engagements — a high-volume, low-reach left enclave that does not move the broader conversation.
Source: Trans Rhetoric Social Media Dashboard
Engagement Shift: Week 1 vs Week 2
Week 1 (May 16–23) carried the IDAHOBIT recognition and — outside the trans fight — the Barney Frank tributes. Week 2 (May 24–31) carried the period’s electoral core: Paxton’s runoff win, Stephen Miller’s false “transgender candidate” claim, and the AB Hernandez championship collision. The shift between halves is the story: right-wing engagement grew 43% (71.6M → 102.6M) while left-wing engagement fell 24% (56.9M → 43.5M). Week 1’s near-parity was an artifact of the Barney Frank mourning; once the campaigns took over in Week 2, the right pulled decisively ahead.
Source: Trans Rhetoric Social Media Dashboard | Week 2 covers May 24-31 (Paxton beats Cornyn, AB Hernandez championships)
Stance classification (pro-trans / anti-trans / neutral) is not yet refreshed for the May 16–31 ingestion window — see Limitations. Political-lean-coded analysis is unaffected and informs the qualitative reading throughout.
Top Accounts
Accounts central to the Case Studies (Stephen Miller and @amuse on Texas; Marco Foster and Oli London on California) appear here with short stats lines — see the case studies for analysis.
Right-Leaning
Libs of TikTok — 12.1M eng, 75 posts, 1.43 score
Chaya Raichik’s aggregation account remained the right’s highest-volume workhorse — 75 posts, 12.1M cumulative engagements, spanning the AB Hernandez sports story and steady Texas runoff follow-on framing. Volume up sharply from the prior cycle; per-post score steady at 1.43.
Stephen Miller — 9.7M eng, 1 post, 34.7 score — see Case Study 1
@amuse — 4.7M eng, 16 posts, 4.01 score
High-performing right-wing aggregator. Lead posts tied Paxton’s win to “Texas Children’s Hospital” trans-care politics, bundling the period’s anti-Democrat stories into a single feed. A central node in the Texas conversation.
Eric Daugherty — 4.7M eng, 17 posts, 1.83 score
Right-wing breaking-news account. Sustained volume across the California race (the Steyer “disgusting moment” framing) and Texas runoff coverage. A reliable mid-tier amplifier that bundles the period’s separate stories into a single anti-Democrat feed.
J.K. Rowling — 4.2M eng, 6 posts, 2.61 score
The single most-followed gender-critical voice in the dataset. Six posts, 4.2M cumulative engagement — her periodic interventions remain among the highest-reach individual right-side moments despite low volume.
Oli London — 4.1M eng, 15 posts, 1.51 score
UK-based right-wing detransitioner. Lead posts: AB Hernandez’s state titles (“Male athlete... won first place in the girls high jump”, see Case Study 2) and Jennifer Lopez’s child coming out as trans (3.9M). Cycles fluidly between the California sports story and celebrity-family content.
Dr. Clown, PhD — 3.7M eng, 26 posts, 2.84 score
Meme-format right-wing account, the engine of the prior period’s Elliot Page template. This cycle ran a steadier mix of celebrity and sports mockery at a still-elevated 2.84 score — evidence the meme-template lane has become a durable fixture rather than a one-cycle spike.
Left-Leaning
Barack Obama — 27.0M eng, 2 posts, 0.43 score
Former president. The single highest-engagement left-side post of the period — a tribute to the late Barney Frank, the gay-rights pioneer who died May 20 — at a 0.43 score, well below his baseline. Counted in the totals but not a trans-rhetoric event; included here for transparency about what is actually driving the left’s headline number.
PinkNews — 17.8M eng, 31 posts, 1.47 score
LGBTQ+ newsroom and the left’s genuine volume leader. Led by archival footage of Rep. Sarah McBride being deliberately misgendered by a GOP colleague (6.7M) and a Graham Norton Show segment with trans actor Zoe Terakes (3.6M). Archive-and-celebration, not defensive policy, is PinkNews’s engine — and the most consistent left format in the dataset.
Brut. — 10.8M eng, 3 posts, 6.82 score
Video-news publisher. The period’s best-performing original left content: a resurfaced 2023 clip of an Arkansas state senator demanding a trans woman describe her genitalia (8.9M, TikTok). The “let them tell on themselves” format — the opponent’s cruelty in their own words — outperformed every earnest rebuttal.
Marco Foster — 3.5M eng, 4 posts, 3.16 score — see Case Study 2
Gianmarco Soresi — 2.6M eng, 6 posts, 2.04 score
Stand-up comedian. Comedy-as-commentary on the period’s anti-trans politics; part of the same comedian-and-clip lane (alongside Brut) that consistently outperforms advocacy-framed content on Instagram and TikTok.
Pop Crave — 2.1M eng, 5 posts, 1.55 score
Entertainment-news aggregator with a left-leaning audience. Covered the celebrity-family trans stories (the Jennifer Lopez and Musk/Rihanna cycles) from the affirming side — the rare left presence in a lane the right otherwise owns.
InteractivePolls — 1.9M eng, 2 posts, 8.18 score
Polling-and-politics aggregator. High per-post score on a small footprint; surfaced the DNC’s 2024 election autopsy and its finding that Trump’s anti-trans advertising moved voters — a rare data-grounded entry in the left’s feed this period.
Neutral
Pop Base — 12.4M eng, 3 posts, 10.53 score
Twitter aggregator (~5M followers) and the period’s neutral amplifier-of-record. Its May 17 recognition of IDAHOBIT (the International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia) hit 10.9M — the same aggregator-driven dynamic flagged last cycle, now delivering a pro-visibility moment rather than amplifying a policy attack.
BBC News (World) — 1.9M eng, 1 post, 23.41 score
International wire. A single high-scoring post; representative of the straight-news layer that covered the Texas and California races and AB Hernandez’s wins without adopting either campaign’s framing.
Daily Mail — 2.1M eng, 41 posts, 2.47 score
UK tabloid, the highest-volume neutral-coded outlet. 41 posts spanning UK bathroom-access debates (Andy Burnham), the California sports story, and celebrity-family content — a tabloid feed that straddles coverage and amplification.
Vogue — 2.9M eng, 4 posts, 1.16 score
Fashion publication. Coverage of trans model Alex Consani and Pride-adjacent culture content — the cultural-visibility lane that runs parallel to the political fight and occasionally feeds it.
CBS News — 1.3M eng, 6 posts, 6.81 score
US broadcast wire. Straight coverage of the period’s political flashpoints; a measured counterweight to the aggregator framing that dominated the same stories on the right.
The Times — 1.3M eng, 3 posts, 3.43 score
UK paper of record. UK-centric trans-policy coverage (healthcare, the Webberley case) that imports into the US conversation via gender-critical accounts.
Case Studies
Case Study 1: The Texas Senate Runoff (May 26–31)
What happened. On May 26, Ken Paxton defeated incumbent Senator John Cornyn in the Texas Republican Senate primary runoff, endorsed by President Trump and treated across the right as a purge of an establishment “RINO.” In his victory speech he opened the general election not on the economy or the border but on his Democratic opponent’s faith and gender views — James Talarico, a state representative, former public-school teacher, and seminary student, recast as “a vegan who thinks God is nonbinary,” “Six Gender Jimmy,” who “loves trans kids.” The conversation detonated on May 27 (36.5M right-side engagements, the period’s biggest right day).
The consolidation. Sitting U.S. senators ran the same lines within hours: Mike Lee (“there is no interpretation of the Bible that can support the Gospel of James Talarico… God isn’t gender nonbinary”), John Barrasso, and Bernie Moreno (“Beto 2.0… a far-left freak who supports… trans ideology”), alongside the Trump operation. CNN’s Scott Jennings’ riff (“I don’t know any Texans who believe in six genders other than Talarico”) became its own viral object via Overton (537K). The trans-and-faith frame was the shared vocabulary of a party falling in line behind Paxton.
The disinformation escalation. The single highest-performing right-wing post of the second week came from White House official Stephen Miller: “The Democrats made history in Texas by nominating their first transgender senate candidate” — 9.7M engagements at a 34.7 score. The claim is false: Talarico is a cisgender man. The fabrication is a category jump from the “God is nonbinary” attack — it does not characterize Talarico as a trans ally but asserts, untruthfully, that he is trans — and it traveled from a senior administration official to nine million people with no correction at comparable scale. Brent Scher’s claim that Talarico’s church preaches the “trans community needs abortion care” (1.9M) ran the same week, fusing faith, trans, and abortion into one attack.
The left response. The most effective pro-Talarico content did not defend his positions — it quoted Paxton’s mockery back at a wider audience. Two posts (a progressive call-to-action account at 1.1M and Aaron Rupar’s bare quote of “a vegan who thinks God is nonbinary” at 831K) outperformed everything the right produced in the standalone Texas conversation, at more than double the right’s per-post score. But there was no sustained operation: strip those two posts and the left was nearly absent from the race the right treated as a launch.
Takeaway. This is the highest-priority elections signal of the period. The right has shown it will run a religion-fused trans attack as the opening move of a marquee Senate race, with officeholder discipline and top-of-government disinformation. Two pre-positioning moves: (1) a rapid-correction capability for fabricated claims like Miller’s — the “first transgender candidate” lie needed a same-day, high-reach rebuttal it never got; (2) lean into the one ground the right least wants to fight — Talarico is a seminarian who can contest scripture directly, the asset that went unused in the social conversation while the attack was being set.
Case Study 2: The AB Hernandez Track Flashpoint (May 25–31)
What happened. AB Hernandez, a trans girl from Jurupa Valley High School, competed in girls’ events at the 106th CIF California State Track & Field Championships in Clovis and won two events (high jump, triple jump). Two candidates for California governor inserted themselves into the meet. Democrat Tom Steyer said he was “totally in favor of trans athletes in high school” and filmed a video personally encouraging Hernandez (“so proud of you for competing”); Republican Steve Hilton promoted his attendance, held a “Save Girls’ Sports” press conference at the championships, and attacked Steyer and fellow Democrat Xavier Becerra on Fox.
The shape of it. The standalone conversation ran ~514 posts and 5.6M engagements, ~93% on Twitter, and it was overwhelmingly right-wing: 363 posts to the left’s 100, with the right driving the genuine engaged outrage (Libs of TikTok, Oli London, OutKick, Andy Ngo, the New York Post). The most-shared single item — a bare clip of Steyer’s quote at 3.3M — was 3.3M passive views with a 0.8% like rate, a controversy clip people watched rather than endorsed, and the same quote was being run by right-wing dunk accounts.
Steyer’s lean-in became the ammunition. This is the structural inverse of the Texas dynamic. There, the left’s most effective tactic was quoting the opponent’s extremism; here the right ran the identical play in reverse, and the Democrat supplied the footage. “So proud of you for competing” traveled because it was usable against Steyer without edit or distortion — on school sports, the single trans subtopic where public opinion is most lopsided against the affirming position. Genuine pro-Steyer voices were real but small (Alejandra Caraballo, 11K: “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a candidate as brave as Tom Steyer”).
The contrast that matters. Set beside Case Study 1: two Democrats, two lean-ins, opposite results. Talarico’s faith-grounded defense kept the left’s energy aimed at his opponent; Steyer’s sports lean-in became a liability. The difference is the ground, not the courage. A Democrat can hold an affirming line on dignity, faith, and youth suicide risk; planting that flag specifically on the fairness-of-competition question invites the fight on the right’s strongest terrain. Steve Hilton, meanwhile, generated only ~150K on his own posts — the volume came from reaction to Steyer, not from the Republican’s protest.
Takeaway. “Let them talk” cuts both ways: the tactic that helps the left against an extreme opponent hurts it when our own candidate hands over a clean clip on a losing issue. Any campaign weighing an on-camera moment on trans sports should assume the footage will be the opponent’s ad. The thing to watch is whether the Steyer clip migrates from Twitter into paid media — a Hilton or independent-expenditure ad built around “so proud of you” is the obvious and most damaging next step.
Strategic Recommendations
COUNTER | PIVOT AWAY | LEAN INTO |
• Stephen Miller’s “first transgender senate candidate” lie: this is a fabricated factual claim from a senior official at 9.7M reach. It needs a same-day, high-reach correction — the kind of rapid-response capability the left did not deploy this cycle. • Paxton’s religion-fused attack on Talarico: contest it on faith ground, where the right is least comfortable. Talarico is a seminarian — the unused asset of the cycle. | • Reading the headline lean split as a near-even fight: the left’s 100.4M is inflated by one 27.0M Barney Frank mourning post at a 0.43 score. Net of it, the right out-engaged the left closer to two-to-one. • Treating the 3.3M Steyer clip as a pro-trans win: it was passive controversy views (0.8% like rate), not support. Don’t mistake reach for mobilization. • Defending Steyer’s sports framing on the merits: school-sports fairness is the right’s strongest terrain. Hold the affirming line on dignity and youth suicide risk; don’t plant the flag on the competition question. • Engaging celebrity-outing content (Jennifer Lopez’s child, Musk’s daughter): amplifying the framing extends it. The affirming move is to celebrate the person, not rebut the mocking caption. | • The “let them tell on themselves” format: Brut’s Arkansas-senator-genitalia clip (8.9M, 6.82 score) was the period’s best-performing original. Build a roster of the opponent’s own cruelty, on camera, ready to surface. • Archive-as-visibility: PinkNews’s Sarah McBride misgendering footage (6.7M) and Zoe Terakes segment (3.6M) led the left’s reach. Maintain a library of archival pro-trans moments timed to news pegs. • Quoting the opponent against himself: the Texas “God is nonbinary” dunks beat everything the right produced in that conversation. The cheap, repeatable play is to clip the opponent’s mockery and let it travel. • The seminarian asset: Talarico can contest scripture directly. Faith-grounded trans affirmation is the ground the right least wants to fight on, and the lane the left left empty this period. • Comedy-and-clip on TikTok: Brut and Gianmarco Soresi outperformed advocacy framing. The comedian-as-messenger lane is the left’s most engagement-efficient format on the platform with the highest per-post reach. |
The bottom line. This was the period trans issues stopped being a side-skirmish and became the explicit center of two marquee campaigns — and the asymmetry was stark. The right ran on it with discipline: a religion-fused Senate attack consolidated by sitting senators, a sports flashpoint a Democrat walked straight into, and top-of-government disinformation at 9.7M reach. The left’s best moments were real but reactive — quoting the opponent’s cruelty (Brut, the Texas dunks) and surfacing archive (PinkNews) — and its headline engagement was propped up by mourning, not mobilization. The right has built reinforcing capabilities the left has not matched: officeholder message discipline and a rapid-response disinformation pipeline. The opening is the same one as last cycle, only sharper: the left needs a standing same-day correction capability and a faith-grounded messenger bench, because the next Paxton-shape attack is already scheduled by the calendar.
Limitations
This report uses the Trans Rhetoric Dashboard database (75,000+ channels, 20 platforms, Junkipedia social listening API). Performance scores are calculated as actual engagement divided by expected engagement based on each account’s historical baseline, winsorized at the 99th percentile in aggregate figures.
The biggest single day is partly an artifact. May 20 (57.2M) and the left’s single largest post — Barack Obama’s tribute to the late Barney Frank (27.0M, 0.43 score) — are LGBTQ-history mourning, not the live trans-policy fight. These posts enter the corpus via LGBTQ keyword overlap. They are included in aggregate totals but de-emphasized in qualitative analysis, and the report flags where they distort the lean comparison.
Stance classification is not yet refreshed for the May 16–31 ingestion window. The rule-based stance classifier (anti-trans / pro-trans / neutral) runs as a separate batch step and was last applied through an earlier window. The Stance Breakdown table that normally appears in “The Data at a Glance” is therefore omitted. Qualitative readings of individual posts and the lean-coded aggregate analysis are unaffected.
Lean-classifier noise. A handful of accounts are mis-coded — e.g., some general-audience and celebrity-aggregator posts are tagged Left- or Right-Leaning on the basis of historical ownership rather than the specific post’s framing. Where a single mis-coded post materially affects a total (most notably the Obama/Barney Frank post in the left column), the report says so explicitly. Some “hernandez” and surname matches also pick up unrelated individuals; these were filtered out of the case-study counts.
Two low-volume days (May 16 and May 23) sit well below the period median (409 and 300 posts respectively). May 23 is a genuine Memorial Day-weekend dip, verified stable across repeated backfills; May 16 was the day a pipeline outage began and was re-pulled to confirm completeness. Neither materially affects the period totals.
Methodology
Data source: Trans Rhetoric Social Media Dashboard, a proprietary monitoring tool built for TFA on the Junkipedia social listening API, tracking 75,000+ channels across 20 platforms with a database of 940,000+ posts spanning January 2024 to present. Posts are collected using 90+ search keywords spanning topic terms, framing terms, and named trans public figures tracked as dedicated keywords.
Relevance classification: Every post is automatically classified using a pattern-matching system with roughly 100 core patterns (explicit trans terms, named individuals) and 30 contextual patterns (indirect framing, policy terms, coded language). Posts matching neither are excluded. All figures filter to relevance in “core” or “contextual.”
Time period: May 16–31, 2026 (16 days). Sample: 16,520 posts from 5,965 unique entities across 14 active platforms; 315.8M total engagements.
Metrics: Engagements (total interactions: likes, comments, shares, reactions). Performance score (ratio of actual to expected engagement, winsorized at the 99th percentile in aggregate figures). Political lean (Left-Leaning, Right-Leaning, Neutral, Unclassified). Stance (pro-trans, anti-trans, neutral) is generated by a separate batch step that has not yet been refreshed for this ingestion window.
Weekly breakdown: Week 1: May 16–23; Week 2: May 24–31. Top content ranked by total engagements within each half.
Validation: Before report generation, the window was backfilled and `python3 ingest.py validate` was run; the two sub-median days (May 16, May 23) were confirmed genuine rather than undercounts. Right-wing winsorized score for the period: 1.59 (n=10,327 posts).
Performance score interpretation: A score of 1.0 means trans content performs at the account’s expected baseline. Above 1.0 means trans content outperforms; below 1.0 means it underperforms.
