Will the media ever quit gushing about Kamala Harris?

One of their favorite themes is that Kamala Harris is a social media sensation.

According to Newsweek:

TikTok was flooded with positive content about Vice President Kamala Harris following President Joe Biden's announcement that he was exiting the presidential race, a report shows.

According to Axios:

Vice President Kamala Harris' TikTok account and her campaign's embrace of online meme culture have garnered much enthusiasm and attention from young voters since the launch of her presidential bid.

... and ...

Harris' campaign appears to have found much more success on the platform, garnering millions of views per video since she entered the presidential race.

• The Kamala HQ account, which was rebranded from Biden HQ after he exited the race, gathered over 40 percent of the likes ever received in just three days, per Politico.

According to The Conversation, a hipster lefty outlet:

And with fewer than 100 days until Americans cast their vote, it’s clear her campaign is trying to speak the digital language of Gen Z and harness youth-dominated social media platforms to gain traction with young voters.

...

In recent weeks, however, her digital footprint has taken on a life of its own. Harris’s passionate online fandom is dubbed the “K-Hive” in a nod to the name of Beyoncé’s dedicated fanbase, the “BeyHive”.

You get the picture. She's just so, so, so, good at this social media medium.

But like anything 'Kamala,' it's actually pretty fake.

 In in terms of legitimate popularity, she's just the same old dislikable Kamala.

Her team is just 'good' at manipulating the dishonest impression that she's somehow popular.

To take a couple of examples, starting with Twitter, here's how many fake followers she has, according to TwitterAudit:

So about 40% of her followers, some 8 million, are authentic and 60%, or, more than half, 12 million, are either low quality bots or outright fakes.

With numbers that high, it's likely her team engineered at least some of them. It's been her game for a while, except that she's upped the fake count to 60%.

I wrote about that here and here.

Why would she need to do that?

There's also funny stuff on her TikTok:

Again, signs that a lot of her popularity is outright fake.

But among what's authentic, even that may be pretty fake.

There's also this, from PostMillenial:

A company known as "Launchviral" has been offering to pay influencers $150 cash to post memes in support Kamala Harris, to tag the president, and to then encourage fans to like, share, and follow Harris as she is running for the presidency.  

According to multiple posts from influencers who were contacted, they were sent messages from the influencer agency known as "Launchviral" to get paid in order to make posts supporting Kamala Harris online. Steve McGrew posted an email that read: "Steve, Paid Post Opportunity - Kamala Harris Presidential Campaign 2024."

Whether these posts are all listed as paid posts and whether the cash paid is listed as campaign expenses is unknown, but it sounds like a job for the Missouri attorney general.

What would the point be of attempting to make Kamala Harris appear more popular than she actually is? One, to attract youthful TikTok users, who will want to seem to be in on the biggest trends.

The other thing is to impress the even more gullible fawning media, who will insist she's so, so, popular, a master at the social media medium.

In reality, her team is a master at the manipulating the social media realm to make Harris appear bigger than she is, like a pufferfish. That's not a grassroots groundswell, that's astroturf.

Whether that translates into votes for Kamala is unknown, but it sure isn't the honest way such things are done. It's not the way President Trump does it, with actual followers who show up in crowds without big payments issued and who go out to vote.

If this is the way someone gets to be president, what a sad state of affairs our country is in. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

Image: Twitter meme