The Kamala Harris campaign is allegedly manipulating numerous Internet platforms, and possibly breaking rules, to artificially boost her popularity and evade fact-checks on false content.
An investigation from The Federalist uncovered what appears to be a vast astroturfing operation run on Discord by paid Harris staffers. Both Reddit and X, according to the report, have been manipulated to help Harris – allegations that follow reporting about the Harris team engaging in shady practices on Google to effectively rewrite headlines of legacy news media articles, again, to boost Harris.
On Reddit, Harris staffers allegedly direct volunteers to post specific content to specific threads, and up-vote or down-vote certain posts – effectively spamming threads and seemingly breaking platform rules. The apparent goal is to make Harris appear more popular than she is, and promote content that helps Harris, even if it’s not true. For example, staffers have allegedly directed the boosting of Project 2025 content, which they tie to former President Donald Trump, even though Trump is not connected to the plan.
In the matter of 15 days, the staffers were able to get thousands of posts published, and the content has received more than 5.7 million upvotes, and over 400,000 comments, the report says. It was also uncovered that 126 of the top 1,000 posts on the mega-popular “Politics” subreddit, in just the past month, were allegedly published by Harris campaign volunteers.
On X, another hugely influential platform for politics, Harris staffers are directing similar activity from volunteers. One goal from the camp is to block “community notes” that are unfavorable to Harris.
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Community notes are basically fact-checks on X, which appear under misleading or outright false posts. Under Elon Musk’s leadership, contributors can add a community note, which is voted on by users to determine if it will be publicly attached to content or not. When Harris campaign staffers direct volunteers to mass “dislike” an unfavorable community note, it won’t appear.
This is likely why pro-Harris accounts have been able to spread falsehoods without fact-checks attached to them. Even CNN, an outlet extremely hostile to Trump, has reported on the routine false information being spewed from “KamalaHQ,” the official Harris camp X account. The same goes for other pro-Harris accounts that appear to be working for the Biden-Harris administration, too.
Google has played a role in the deception, too. Aside from the company’s documented bias against Trump, it also permitted the Harris campaign to change headlines and subheadings of mainstream articles to appear more favorable to Harris, left-leaning outlet Axios exposed over the summer.
For example, if one were to conduct a Google search related to health care, they might get a link to an NPR story that’s sponsored by the Harris team. The campaign, however, in numerous instances, has edited that headline and subheadline. In one case, the story would now appear with the headline, “Harris will lower health care costs.”
In other words, users would think they’re reading a preview for an NPR story, while they’re actually reading content from the Harris camp.
The news organizations whose content was being manipulated, such as USA Today, the Associated Press, NPR, and others, were unaware of the changes. Also of note, the Trump campaign does not engage in this shady practice.
On Wednesday, “Reddit Lies,” the account that broke the story, said it was banned from the campaign-run Discord server that’s organizing the astroturfing operation, indicating the Harris team is likely aware the operation has been exposed.
The Harris-Walz volunteer discord server just banned my account.
We expected this. That’s why we quietly archived the server over the past week and are now releasing the files to the broader public.
Deadman’s switch.https://t.co/0Sud1WxbqQ
— Reddit Lies (@reddit_lies) October 30, 2024
Additionally, Musk has already reacted to the allegations concerning X, announcing he’s opened an investigation into the Harris team’s antics.
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