"What Swift’s defenders didn’t realize, however, was that they were pushing back against a false narrative that had been seeded and amplified by a small network of inauthentic social accounts. Worse, they were helping to disseminate those bad-faith allegations by earnestly engaging with them.
That’s according to new research from GUDEA, a behavioral intelligence startup that tracks how such reputation-damaging claims emerge and go viral on the internet. In a white paper examining more than 24,000 posts and 18,000 accounts across 14 digital platforms between Oct. 4 (the day after The Life of a Showgirl came out) and Oct. 18, shared first with Rolling Stone, the firm concluded that just 3.77 percent of accounts drove 28 percent of the conversation around Swift and the album during that period. This cluster of evidently coordinated accounts pushed the most inflammatory Swift content, including conspiracy theories about her supposed Nazi allusions, callouts for her theoretical MAGA ties, and posts that framed her relationship with fiancé Travis Kelce as inherently conservative or “trad,” with all of this framed as leftist critique."
“I’m a pop-culture girl,” says Georgia Paul, GUDEA’s head of customer success, who suggested the company look at the conversation around Swift after she had a “gut feeling” that the ideologically charged remarks about The Life of a Showgirl she was seeing might trace back to manipulative actors. Paul and her colleagues confirmed that suspicion, identifying two distinct spikes in misleading activity related to Swift. The first came on Oct. 6 and 7, with approximately 35 percent of the posts in GUDEA’s data set for that time frame generated by accounts behaving more like bots than human users. The second took place over Oct. 13 and 14, after Swift released a merch collection that included the lightning bolt necklace (commemorating the song “Opalite”), with about 40 percent of posts shared by inauthentic accounts and conspiracist content accounting for 73.9 percent of the total volume of conversation. "
“The internet is fake,” says Keith Presley, GUDEA’s founder and CEO, only half-jokingly. He notes that some 50 percent of the web is now made up of bots. “This is something that we’ve seen escalate on our corporate side — this type of espionage, or working to damage someone’s reputation.”
While Presley and his team don’t know the identity of the individual or group behind this attack, they did discover “a significant user overlap between accounts pushing the Swift ‘Nazi’ narrative and those active in a separate astroturf campaign attacking Blake Lively,” according to the paper. The actress has claimed in an ongoing sexual harassment lawsuit that actor and director Justin Baldoni organized a chorus of smears against her on social media as the two waged a bitter legal and PR war over the troubled production of their 2024 film It Ends With Us. Their data, GUDEA researchers wrote in their report, “reveals a cross-event amplification network, one that disproportionately influences multiple celebrity-driven controversies and injects misinformation into otherwise organic conversations.”
"“When we put our doomsday hat on, I think we can see that reality,” Paul says of the test-run scenario. It could be, she speculates, “that there might be other nefarious actors, not U.S.-based, who have reasons to see, ‘If I can move the fan base for Taylor Swift — an icon who is this political figure, in a way — does that mean I can do it in other places?’”
While the true intent of the person or persons behind the account cluster remains a mystery, the mechanics of their deception are relatively transparent: convincing authentic users to mock or refute outlandish claims simply enhances their reach in a given digital ecosystem. “That’s part of the goal for these types of narratives, for whoever is pushing them,” Presley says. “Especially with these inflammatory ones — that’s going to get rewarded by the algorithm. You’ll see the influencers jump on first, because it’s going to get them clicks.” Downstream of these well-known figures, anonymous followers will start churning out their own takes."
Fantastic read by @milesklee.bsky.social
So be aware, and remember:
51% Of all internet traffic is now bots. Of that 51%, 37% of that is bad bots.
"If I can move the fan base for Taylor Swift — an icon who is this political figure, in a way — does that mean I can do it in other places?’
![Quote from Washington Times editorial board
"[Radical liberals] don't realize that, when they express contempt for the man who holds the country's highest office, they reveal their contempt for the Americans who put him there."](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:222p42fegwhwfyrc3gqam76j/bafkreib4nkrafaic6rpwa7wyeesnlmjeu23sshxjjpvqtr33wk7ztuxb2y)
