Once, not so long ago, the Red Guard “spontaneously” swept through China in force, destroying the “Four Olds” and creating the illusion of a grassroots, youth-led, mass movement of revolution. As it turns out, there was nothing spontaneous about it. Rather, the illusion was created by gathering dozens of smaller units led by trained cadres into one space, like Tiananmen Square, where Mao Zedong held his enormous rallies. The effect was as magnificent as it was artificial, yet it took the good people of China too long to realize what was happening to their country. Mao’s coordinated propaganda machine mobilized a popular revolution out of thin air.
America is currently experiencing something similar, but the propaganda machine has moved to the digital world. The Harris-Walz presidential campaign is leading an active campaign to manipulate information on multiple social media platforms.
The Harris campaign is creating an illusion of mass support, spreading lies about its opponents and violating various rules on these platforms – not to mention the blatant dishonesty at play here.
According to a multi-part report from the Federalist, the Harris campaign is behind a coordinated effort to “artificially boost their popularity, spread election disinformation, and skirt election laws.” The author saw a post inviting Reddit users to join a Discord server, coordinating an “astroturfing” campaign.
Astroturfing is a “political and marketing term that describes creating swarms of coordinated and/or paid messages and posts to create the illusion of support from ordinary people deceptively. Essentially, ‘astroturfing’ is the opposite of grassroots support.” Accordingly, several moderators, who are Harris campaign volunteers sometimes, spam certain pieces of information onto social media. Then, they direct people to like and comment on it in a very organized fashion. Check out the original report for a full breakdown and screenshots of the Discord server and spreadsheets they use.
How effective was the Reddit inflation campaign? The report found “1,728 posts created by 67 unique Harris-Walz campaign volunteers since Oct. 4, many of which received a LOT of traction in a very short time span.” Further, by applying a filter on the last 1,000 posts on r/Politics, which has a reach of 8 million users, it was found that this subreddit was glutted with Harris campaign workers: “Of the top 1,000 posts on r/Politics, 126 were written by a user bearing the mark ‘Kamala Harris Volunteer.’”
These actions directly violate Reddit’s terms of service, which explicitly forbid vote manipulation of any kind. The Harris campaign has manipulated other platforms as well.
On X, the goals differ slightly because of the structure of the platform: One particular goal, according to a user of the Harris-Walz campaign Discord server, is to get campaign volunteers to swarm the site and “block [Community Notes] we don’t like.” The Community Notes feature is designed to correct false information, but there is a voting system to ”mitigate political bias” on a post. A community note will only stay with enough “upvotes,” but it can also be “downvoted,” and it can eventually disappear.
According to the second part of the report, this system is likewise being artificially manipulated by the Harris campaign volunteers running the Discord server. While community notes have more effectively mitigated the impact of political bias on X, the Discord server volunteers have been contributing false Community Notes as well as advising and soliciting support from users: “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.”
In a fitting conclusion to this saga, Reddit moderators removed the original report from the Federalist when a user posted it on the platform: “The moderators of Reddit’s 8 million-member politics message board, known as a subreddit, removed The Federalist report itself when a user posted it. The headline — ‘The Harris Campaign Manipulates Reddit to Control the Platform’ — allegedly violates the board’s rules.”
Thanks to the excellent reporting from Reddit Lies on X, this campaign move was brought to light. The Harris campaign is creating an illusion of mass support, spreading lies about its opponents, and violating various rules on these platforms — not to mention the blatant dishonesty at play here. The Chinese were crushed by a similar deceitful propaganda campaign. We can only hope that we don’t repeat history.
Kamala harris, Twitter, X, Reddit lies, Kamala harris reddit, Reddit, Media manipulation, Tech