Democrats are reportedly coordinating activity on Reddit and abusing X Community Notes
Kamala Harris’ and Tim Walz’s campaign staff have organized “astroturf” operations on the social media platform Reddit and conspired to manipulate the Community Notes feature on X, according to an American researcher.
The Harris-Walz campaign “fraudulently games Community Notes with sock puppet accounts and astroturf tactics. And we have the screenshots and spreadsheets and campaign comms to prove it,” Sean Davis, founder of the outlet Federalist, posted on Wednesday.
Davis was citing a series of articles by a researcher going by the handle ‘Reddit Lies’, including screenshots taken from the Harris-Walz server on the messaging platform Discord, purporting to show how the Democrats conspired to swamp social media with their content, while suppressing criticism.
What a surprise. All that crying about Russia, Russia, Russia. Many of us have long known that there was coordination going on and that the teams and tactics date back to the Hillary campaign.
The researchers are of course Republican reactionary types. But it's nice they're paying attention and howling about this as it would be if they do something to harass or punish these people if they win power as they are ever so annoying.
The sources being some "researcher" from The Federalist who in turn cites a reddit account is about as weak of evidence as you can get.
At the same time its blatantly obvious that this has been going on for over a decade. Both parties and every super-pac run volunteer brigading operations come election season. Maybe some subcontract it out. Maybe some of them have actual bot-nets. Either way astro-turfing social media is the new way to manufacture consent. Russia was just late to the game and embarrassingly obvious in its attempts.