TITLE: Inside Trump’s Truth Social Conspiracy Theory Machine
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/10/29/us/politics/trump-truth-social-conspiracy-theories.html
EXCERPT: The Times analyzed thousands of Mr. Trump’s posts and reposts over a six-month period in 2024 and found that at least 330 of them met two tightly defined and striking criteria: They each described both a false, secretive plot against Mr. Trump or the American people and a specific entity supposedly responsible for it. The unfounded theories ranged from suggestions that the F.B.I. had ordered his assassination to accusations that government officials had orchestrated the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021.
About 75 percent of the conspiracy-theory posts came directly from Mr. Trump’s account. The rest Mr. Trump reposted from other social media accounts. The Times also analyzed hundreds more of his posts and reposts that didn’t strictly meet both criteria but still invoked the theories with slogans and subtle references.
Since Mr. Trump inaugurated the platform with its first post in 2022, Truth Social has attracted the kinds of users, and the kinds of posts, that mainstream and more heavily moderated social networks might not have tolerated. Mr. Trump’s use of the platform is near constant; he averaged 30 posts a day in the six-month period The Times analyzed. That frequency far surpasses his posting on any other social media network this year, and shows how much Mr. Trump relies on the platform, and its users, to bolster his conspiratorial worldview.
From July to September, Truth Social received an average of about 4.7 million unique monthly visitors, according to the web analytics firm Similarweb. Those users are, in general, part of a group whose fealty to Mr. Trump sets the network apart from larger ones like Facebook or X, which have monthly user counts orders of magnitude higher. While Truth Social is populated by many everyday fans and supporters of Mr. Trump’s, there are also sensationalist right-wing media upstarts, Covid deniers and devotees of QAnon, a far-right conspiracy theory whose adherents think that satanic pedophiles control the “deep state.”
“He’s building a coalition of people who just see the world in a very dark way,” said Joseph Uscinski, who is a co-author of the book “American Conspiracy Theories” and a professor of political science at the University of Miami. Mr. Trump’s rhetoric, he said, isn’t meant to cater to traditional Republican values, but instead appeals to those “who just want to see the system blown up.”
The conspiracy theories that Mr. Trump is exposed to on Truth Social have made their way into his campaign speeches and public appearances. He has repeatedly referred, both online and off, to an “enemy from within” that includes Democrats and government officials, and suggested that the military might be needed to handle them. In October, Mr. Trump described the Jan. 6 riot as a day of “love” at a town hall event and two days later shared a Truth Social post that claimed the attack had been staged by the federal government.
Not everything Mr. Trump posts to Truth Social is a conspiracy theory. But almost every voice he amplifies at least dabbles in them — some even more extreme than what Mr. Trump shares from their accounts.
TITLE: On Elon Musk’s X, Republicans go viral as Democrats disappear
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/10/29/elon-musk-x-republican-democrat-twitter-election/
EXCERPTS: Changes under Musk to X’s recommendation algorithm, which decides which posts to promote or bury in people’s feeds, have prioritized popular content from around the platform over posts from the accounts a user chooses to follow. That opaque system makes it challenging to know why some tweets go viral more often than others.
But right-wing tweeters have clearly benefited under Musk’s reign.
Since July 2023, the Republicans in The Post’s analysis have seen huge booms in their follower counts. Seventeen of the 20 accounts with the biggest follower growth are Republicans, including Rep. Matt Gaetz (Florida) and Sen. Josh Hawley (Missouri), who gained around 500,000.
One of the few Democrats to gain in the rankings, Rep. Colin Allred (Texas), secured about 35,000 new followers; he’s competing for the Senate seat of Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who gained more than 400,000. Ten members in the data actually lost followers — all of them Democrats.
Most of the accounts’ posts make less of an impression now than during X’s more vibrant past, the analysis shows. The typical post from a Republican last month was seen about 7,900 times, a little over half as many views as it would have gotten in July 2023. But it was still seen more than the average Democratic post, which received 4,100 views last month, down from 5,600 last summer.
The Republicans are posting more now, too, allowing them to greatly outnumber Democrats on users’ feeds. The Republicans’ tweets totaled more than 7.5 billion views since July 2023 — more than double the Democrats’ 3.3 billion, the analysis found.
Democrats have voiced suspicion over whether X is treating left-leaning accounts more harshly, such as when the platform briefly suspended a “White Dudes for Harris” account shortly after it helped raise millions for Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign. X did not respond to questions for what caused the suspension, which Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-New York) in July described as “platform censorship.”
Under Musk, the platform has secretly throttled traffic to the New York Times and other sites Musk has vilified; reinstated previously banned political accounts; and launched a payment system for influencers whose first beneficiaries skewed hard right.
Musk also has a history of bending the platform to his whims. After a Super Bowl tweet of his underperformed President Joe Biden’s, Musk directed X engineers to boost his posts higher in people’s feeds to maximize global attention to himself. In August, he devoted X’s most premium real estate to a two-hour chat with Trump, who later endorsed a plan to give Musk a leadership role in reducing government spending.
Despite X’s declining engagement, the platform has regularly depicted itself as near the peak of its influence. X said this month it was seeing “all-time highs in usage,” with 547 million monthly active users spending 363 billion “user-seconds” a day. And in August, the company said its platform had more Democrats than Republicans, adding, “There’s a place for everyone in the global town square.”
X’s changing policies and conversations have driven some users off the platform and to a small but growing group of social media competitors. After X recently redrew its rules to allow blocked users to see a user’s tweets, the social network Bluesky said it gained half a million new users in a single day.
But the company has found one potentially lucrative niche: right-wing political advertising. A Post analysis earlier this month found that the backers of Republican candidates were outspending Democrats on the platform three to one.
TITLE: BUSTED: The Inside Story Of How The Kamala Harris Campaign Manipulates Reddit (And Breaks The Rules) To Control The Platform
https://thefederalist.com/2024/10/29/busted-the-inside-story-of-how-the-kamala-harris-campaign-manipulates-reddit-and-breaks-the-rules-to-control-the-platform/
EXCERPTS: 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.
[W]e’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.
Reddit is broken into thousands of message boards on discrete topics, known as “subreddits.” The Politics subreddit and several others are being actively targeted by the Harris-Walz campaign, with notable success. Since the Reddit astroturfing operation started, it has rapidly developed an organizational structure — complete with roles for team members, spreadsheets for tracking their analytics, and “Key Messaging” to stick to when making a social media post.
I found that 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. Here’s how they achieved it.
Every weekday morning, Harris for President staffers like Gabrielle Lynn post the “Daily Messaging Guidance” to the server’s Reddit channel. It usually consists of articles and data that the Harris-Walz campaign wants to boost, as well as “key messaging” that their Reddit volunteers should stick to.
On Gabrielle Lynn’s profile, you’ll find a Staff icon (the blue D), which indicates that she is a paid Democrat staffer. In this case, Gabrielle is a Harris for President staffer.
The links compiled by official Harris-Walz staffers, along with other articles submitted by volunteers, are added to a Google Spreadsheet called “Reddit Organizing.”
Kamala’s “Lead Posters” (people who have demonstrated a “cultural” knowledge of Reddit) then choose which links will resonate best with different Reddit communities. For instance, a link about “how Project 2025 impacts reproductive health” will be directed towards communities with young women as their primary user base, whereas news about Kamala’s Fox News interview “winning over swing state voters” gets directed to Reddit’s Democrat communities, and possibly to people living in swing states.
Harris-Walz campaign volunteers have created a database of more than 100 subreddits — each containing detailed information on what kind of content they permit, what topics perform the best, and any specific notes about each community, such as how much “karma” or cumulative upvotes one needs to post in each subreddit.
After their links have been collected and categorized, volunteer “Posters” will take a handful of the links provided and post them to their assigned subreddits. Kamala’s posters, however, don’t simply spam links haphazardly. They use a calculated, sequential post timing metric to avoid Reddit’s built-in spam filters. Harris-Walz campaign volunteers often discuss their ban-avoidance tactics in their Discord server, while continuing to spam Reddit with their collected links.
Once the users make their Reddit posts, they return to the spreadsheet and update it with a link to their brand-new post.
And why do they collect their post links?
They collect their Reddit links so Kamala’s volunteers can flood the post with likes and comments, thus making them appear more active. This, in turn, triggers the algorithm to make the post appear in more user timelines. Reddit’s post activity algorithm is extremely simple, and can easily be abused, which is known on Reddit as “brigading.”
It’s safe to say that the Harris-Walz astroturfing operation has fundamentally compromised the authenticity of political discussions on Reddit. Kamala is actively ruining the internet by making her campaign look far more popular than it is in reality.
The actions, while seemingly not illegal, directly violate Reddit’s Terms of Service. The volunteers of the Harris-Walz campaign are using multiple accounts to manipulate votes …
It’s unknown if Reddit is aware of the policy violations being performed by the Harris-Walz campaign. While it’s possible that their accounts will be banned when their actions come to light, it is also entirely possible that Reddit is giving the Harris-Walz campaign free rein to violate the rules. In 2018, Reddit’s CEO Steve Huffman plainly stated in an interview with The New Yorker:
I’m confident that Reddit could sway elections. We wouldn’t do it, of course. And I don’t know how many times we could get away with it. But, if we really wanted to, I’m sure Reddit could have swayed at least this election, this once.