For years, many have speculated that Democrat political candidates may be filling social media with fake posts to deceive the public and make their campaigns and causes seem more popular than they are. These claims have often been dismissed, citing that Democrat voters are already more likely to be on the internet compared to their not-as-tech-savvy Republican counterparts.
This would suggest that the constant flood of left-leaning content on websites such as Reddit was merely a reflection of the userbase. However, many people simply couldn’t shake the feeling that something was just off, especially in the run up to major elections. Despite my fervent belief that something was amiss, I never had any direct proof that Democrats were actively manipulating social media.
That all changed two weeks ago, when X user @jessiprincey replied to one of my posts with a screenshot from a Discord server, seemingly related to the Harris-Walz campaign:
I immediately messaged Jess, and soon received a link to the Discord server where this operation was taking place. What I’d find there went far beyond algorithmic manipulation. I discovered massive “astroturfing” campaigns operating across multiple platforms. “Astroturfing” is a political and marketing term that describes creating swarms of coordinated and/or paid messages and posts to deceptively create the illusion of support from ordinary people. Essentially, “astroturfing” is the opposite of grassroots support.
In this case, there is a team of volunteers who spam social media with posts that specifically promote Kamala. They then have other users pretend to be random individuals who just happened across the post and decided to comment. It’s no different than a shady company paying a team to write a bunch of fake Amazon reviews about their product to make it appear to be a better and more popular product than it is.
On Amazon, that might result in a product getting more sales. In a U.S. election, it could mean that the falsely advertised candidate receives more votes. This behavior is not only incredibly dishonest, but in many cases, it directly violates the Terms of Service they’ve agreed to by operating on certain social media platforms.
In part one of a three-part series, we’re going to look at how the Harris-Walz campaign has manipulated the popular website Reddit, one of the top social media sites with 500 million users, to publish campaign propaganda.
