“The internet is fake,” says Keith Presley, GUDEA’s founder and CEO, only half-jokingly. He notes that some 50 percent of the web is now made up of bots. “This is something that we’ve seen escalate on our corporate side — this type of espionage, or working to damage someone’s reputation.”
Wild that the bot from the story is the first comment on the thread.
They’re all over this thread, unfortunately.
Like… it’s quite the jump from “this album isn’t for me” to “TAYLOR IS A MAGA TRADWIFE NAZI!” who… checks notes endorsed Kamala Harris, hates Trump, said the idea that she’d quit working after marriage “shockingly offensive” and that she definitely has more money than any “tradwife” ever dared?
taylor swift: nazi empress has been a thing since at least 2016. that is when i saved the first meme i saw of it.
Honestly I think a lot of that #TaylorSwiftIsOverParty thing from back then was a lot of trolls, too, practicing for the election interference that year (as theorized in this article from today), as the snake emojis from the time made their reappearance later in the year on the social media of female politicians. Except now there’s more bots to do it as well.
probably. i appreciate the absurd humor in it though.
It’s funny in an “oh god, people are dumb and the world is doomed” way.
the bot campaign part is funny that way (read:deeply unsettling and concerning), however the initial conceit of Taylor being a secret Nazi empress is itself legitimately funny. not quite in a Mel Brooks way, but like early SNL. a little dark, a little edgy, but absurd enough to be truly funny. i especially like the version wherein she’s also a time traveler.
Would not have guessed this sub was home to so many Swifties…
It’s a crosspost; that’s how I saw it personally. I suspected a bot campaign over two months ago. But anyway, I’ve been aware of Dead Internet Theory for years and have tried to teach others about it.
Look up Melissa Nathan, Tag PR, and the coordinated attacks she was paid to run on Amber Heard and Blake Lively, the latter being a close friend of Swift’s:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/21/business/media/blake-lively-justin-baldoni-it-ends-with-us.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share
So that's why I know the name Justin Badingle or whatever.
I don't have a Rolling Stone subscription, so I can't read the article, but what I'm seeing from other subs talking about this article it sounds like they explicitly name dropped Justin Baldoni, and said it looks like the same PR company he used?
If that's the case, it's Tag PR, and yeah that's where you know Justin Baldoni from. Ugh, screw that company so much. I seriously do not understand how the online misinformation campaigns they run are actually legal. At least Taylor Swift has enough money to take serious legal action, so here's hoping Melissa Nathan finally gets her FAFO moment.
What I find interesting is that most people who support her are taking this article at face value.
The article did not post a link to any of the research to verify it.
The research was also done by a company that does online PR research work for celebrities and companies.
What I find interesting is that it’s either bots or we have an epidemic of people drowning in bowls.
Simultaneous bowl drowning
One day, I hope "bowl drowning" becomes an official term for something.
No the fuck it wasn’t lol
I guess we have an epidemic of people drowning in bowls then.
Simultaneous bowl drowning
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You could not waterboard me into hiring people to go online and call me a white supremacist Nazi. Literally what the fuck are you talking about.
Exactly. She’s a young, popular, openly left-wing woman. She’s going to get smear campaigns from all around the world without having to machinate anything.
Openly left wing? She’s a capitalist billionaire grifter, tf are you talking about.
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lol indeed, you must be new here. Creating false scarcity in effort to pinch every penny from the poor folks willing to buy her products is the grift. In what way is she left wing?
"Guys, is it grifting to...do what music acts have been doing literally forever?"
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You didn’t ask how she was left wing but you asked what the grift was. I’m not confused, but you might be.
Woah, woah, woah I take offense. Poor people have way better taste in music.
Assuming this is in good faith, there have been various business practices that would be easily called dishonest in other fields. Releasing the same album a hundred times with slight tweaks for collectors. This also has the effect that Swift always is at the top of best selling artists since she always has a newest album, thus crowding out other (female) singers from the top spaces.
She beats out the male artists too, but that doesn’t fit the narrative- nor does the fact that other artists have put out more variants than she does. There haven’t been any new physical variants anyway since week 1.
Lmao sure. Right-wingers love her.
They do. The democrats love her
Some do, some don’t… outside of very serious Swiftie communities (mostly liberal-leaning ones), people generally don’t associate Taylor Swift with any particular political position. I’ve seen both left and right wingers who like and dislike her.
I think it’s stupid that people think she’s a full-on Nazi, but I also really don’t think she’s as progressive as a lot of her fans seem to think she is.
She's far from beyond criticism.
This has to be satire, right?