Analyzing the Narratives: Biden vs. Trump at the First 2024 Debate

President Biden's performance at the first 2024 presidential debate resulted in a significant surge in social media mentions, likely due to public concerns about his age and competence. Perhaps surprisingly, the debate generated ~25% more mentions on X (Twitter) related to former President Trump’s perceived lies and fact-checking (or lack thereof) than mentions related to President Biden’s age, coherence, etc. This disparity may be explained by the likely high number of posts on President Biden’s age that are cheapfakes — videos, gifs, images, or memes presented without accompanying text or written context.

Let’s explore the findings:

Mentions of Biden’s Age vs. Trump’s Falsehoods

President Biden's performance at the first 2024 presidential debate resulted in a significant surge in social media mentions, likely due to public concerns about his age and competence.

Perhaps surprisingly, the debate generated ~25% more mentions on X (Twitter) related to former President Trump’s perceived lies and fact-checking (or lack thereof) than mentions related to President Biden’s age, coherence, etc.
This disparity may be explained by the likely high number of posts on President Biden’s age that are cheapfakes — videos, gifs, images, or memes presented without accompanying text or written context.

Mentions Biden vs. Trump

The debate caused a significant deviation from the baseline for the number of posts mentioning President Biden. In contrast, the debate did not prompt mentions of President Trump to surge significantly above baseline.

During the debate period, two hours before the debate itself and one hour after (7:00pm-12:00am ET), there were 2,522,120 posts mentioning Biden. This represents a 101.48% increase from his daily average since May 29, exceeding it by 1,270,319 posts.
In contrast, former President Donald Trump received 2,062,020 mentions during the same period, approximately 500,000 less than Biden. Notably, Trump's debate mentions were 7.23% lower than his daily average of 2,222,738 posts.
This disparity may be explained by former President Trump’s constant presence in the news cycle, related to his criminal indictments and other controversies.
The significant increase in posts about President Biden — with no deviation for former President Trump, may also be explained by the gap in expectations and delivery for President Biden’s performance.
In contrast, former President Trump appeared to perform about as expected, even if that performance was largely characterized by a stream of statements that failed fact-checking.

Mentions of Biden’s Age & Mental Capacity:

Concerns specifically related to Biden's age and mental competence spiked dramatically during the debate window (7:00pm-12:00am ET).

PeakMetrics detected 372,052 posts on this topic during the debate window, a 312.82% increase compared to the average of 90,124 age-related posts from June 1-25. This surge more than doubled the number of posts from the previous highest day this month (other than the debate) — June 17th (173,169 posts). This earlier spike in mentions around President Biden’s age and competency was driven by the president’s attendance at D-Day and Juneteenth celebrations, and associated videos of President Biden appearing in public at these events.

Mentions of Trump’s Lies/Fact-Checking/Falsehoods

Notably, during the window of the debate (9:00pm-11:00pm ET), there were more posts on X (Twitter) related to President Trump and lies, fact-checking, falsehoods, etc. than posts related to President Biden’s age, competence, coherence, etc.

At the debate’s peak at the 10 o’clock hour, posts mentioning Trump’s lies and fact-checking rose ~5000% higher than the pre-debate chatter three hours earlier. Posts touching on Biden’s age and competency rose only ~1700%.
The debate generated ~25% more posts related to former President Trump’s perceived lies and fact-checking (or lack thereof) than posts related to President Biden’s age, coherence, etc.
This disparity may be explained by the inherently visual nature of many of the critiques on President Biden’s age and competence. More posts, using videos, gifs, images, or memes may have been created and shared related to President Biden’s age that are not captured in this data set — which is based on keyword mentions.

Like these findings? Request a demo of PeakMetrics narrative intelligence.