X owner Elon Musk announced that his team is investigating Vice President Kamala Harris’ manipulation of social media to artificially inflate her online support.
The billionaire entrepreneur announced the probe after The Federalist published two parts of a three-part investigative series about the Democrats leveraging a cadre of dedicated followers to “spread election disinformation, and skirt election laws” with online forums, including X. (Read part one here and part two here.)
“We are investigating this,” Musk wrote on X a few weeks after warning voters at a Pennsylvania rally this fall that if Harris wins, “this will be the last election.”
According to the anonymous internet watchdog Reddit Lies, writing in The Federalist, the Harris campaign is engaged in a practice known as “astroturfing,” wherein massive swaths of coordinated messages generate an illusion of support far broader than actually exists.
“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,” the watchdog reported this week. “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.”
On Reddit, the sixth-most popular website in the world, “126 of the top 1,000 posts in the past month on r/Politics were posted by official Harris-Walz campaign volunteers.”
“Owning one out of every eight of all top posts in r/Politics is not an easy feat, and it doesn’t just happen,” wrote Reddit Lies, explaining how the Harris campaign made it happen as part of a coordinated effort of volunteers deliberately working to circumvent platform safety guards against spam. “It’s safe to say that the Harris-Walz astroturfing operation has fundamentally compromised the authenticity of political discussions on Reddit.”
Reddit Lies outlined in part two of the investigation for The Federalist how Harris supporters are also systematically downgrading community notes that make her campaign look bad. Despite reform measures implemented at X under Musk, “virtually none of the false and misleading tweets from Kamala Harris’ campaign have Community Notes appended to them.”
“One likely explanation for this discrepancy is that the Harris campaign is directing volunteers on its Discord server to vote down Community Notes even when those notes accurately say the campaign is being deceptive,” Reddit Lies reported. “In the ‘twitter-community-notes’ channel found on the Harris-Walz Discord, paid Democrat staffers are also writing dubious Community Notes on X to undermine GOP and Trump messaging. They then encourage volunteers to rate them positively.”
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan's email newsletter here.