Elon Musk, the owner of X, announced that his team is looking into Kamala Harris ‘ use of social media to inflated her online support.
The Federalist published two parts of a three-part analytical set about the Democrats using a corps of committed supporters to” spread election propaganda and scarf election rules” with online forums, including X, after the billionaire businessman made the announcement. ( Read the first and second parts here. )
After warning citizens at a Pennsylvania march this fall that Harris would win, Musk declared,” We are investigating this.” Musk said on X.
The Harris plan is engaged in a process known as “astroturfing,” in which large swaths of coordinated communications create an illusion of support that is much wider than really exists, according to the private online guardian Reddit Lies, writing in The Federalist.
The watchdog reported this week that “it’s no different than a shady company paying a team to write a number of fake Amazon reviews” about their product to make it appear better and more popular than it actually 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 goes against the Terms of Service they’ve agreed to by using some social media platforms, which is not only incredibly dishonest, but in many cases it goes against them.
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 of every eight of all top posts in r/Politics is not an easy feat, and it does n’t just happen,” wrote Reddit Lies, describing how the Harris campaign made it happen as part of a coordinated effort of volunteers purposefully working to circumvent platform safety guards against spam. ” It’s safe to say that the Harris-Walz astroturfing operation has fundamentally compromised the legitimacy of political discussions on Reddit.”
In Part Two of the investigation for The Federalist, Reddit Lies uncovered Harris ‘ supporters ‘ ongoing efforts to systematically lower the status of community notes that make her campaign look bad. Despite the reform initiatives put in place at X under Musk, “virtually none of the false and misleading tweets from Kamala Harris ‘ campaign have Community Notes attached to them.”
According to Reddit Lies,” One likely explanation for this discrepancy is that the Harris campaign is directing volunteers to vote down Community Notes even when those notes accurately state the campaign is being deceptive.” ” 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”.
