X owner Elon Musk announced that his team is investigating Vice President Kamala Harris’ manipulation of social media to artificially inflate her online support.
The billionaire entrepreneur announced the probe after The Federalist published two parts of a three-part investigative series about the Democrats leveraging a cadre of dedicated followers to “spread election disinformation, and skirt election laws” with online forums, including X. (Read part one here and part two here.)
“We are investigating this,” Musk wrote on X a few weeks after warning voters at a Pennsylvania rally this fall that if Harris wins, “this will be the last election.”
According to the anonymous internet watchdog Reddit Lies, writing in The Federalist, the Harris campaign is engaged in a practice known as “astroturfing,” wherein massive swaths of coordinated messages generate an illusion of support far broader than actually exists.
“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,” the watchdog reported this week. “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.”
On Reddit, the sixth-most popular website in the world, “126 of the top
