is features writer with five years of experience covering the companies that shape technology and the people who use their tools.
On December 9th, Rolling Stone published a story that some saw as a bombshell: a network of coordinated, “inauthentic” social media accounts had a hand in the weekslong discourse that trailed the release of Taylor Swift’s recent album, The Life of a Showgirl.
It was a big deal for those in the Swiftie/anti-Swiftie universe. Immediately following the record’s release in October, discussion of Showgirl was fan- and critic-driven — passionate but fairly calm. Listeners debated the meaning of songs, analyzed the flood of material for hidden meanings, and questioned whether the music was even good. Some fans took issue with specific lyrics, especially around Swift’s use of slang or metaphors. But at some point the discussion took a turn, and soon the tenor on social media was about whether Swift was hiding Nazi imagery into her output, or whether she was secretly MAGA. (The musician endorsed Kamala Harris for president in 2024.) Soon enough in corners of the internet, the album release was consumed by fights over whether Swift was signaling a hard right-wing pivot.
On its surface, the conversations might seem like standard fandom and anti-fandom, prompted by a much-hyped album from an artist that a lot of people have big feelings about. But the cycle of trending discourse snowballing into wall-to-wall social media activity is more than a fan rabbit hole: it’s an example of how uneven incentives turbocharge the sludge in our contemporary media ecosystem.
Two months later, new research by a little-known social listening firm seemed to upend what the public knew about how that viral discourse spread. Rolling Stone reported on research compiled by a company called Gudea, which promises clients “early visibility into rising narratives” on social media platforms. Gudea had analyzed 24,679 posts from 18,213 users on 14 different online platforms as they discussed Swift in the days following the album release. According to the report, “inauthentic” narratives that started on fringe platforms like 4chan eventually jumped to other more mainstream platforms like X and TikTok, where real people began debating whether Swift was pushing Nazi symbols and comparing Swift with Kanye West.
“This demonstrates how a strategically seeded falsehood can convert into widespread authentic discourse, reshaping public perception even when most users do not believe the originating claim,” the report reads. For some Swift fans, it was incontrovertible proof that negative discourse was the work of bots and agents of chaos. They took a victory lap.
But now Gudea’s report and Rolling Stone’s coverage has triggered a second wave of arguments that have at times spiraled into a new and ever-expanding web of theories: about Swift and her covert PR moves, Gudea and Rolling Stone, and the very act of posting online.
“No, you goofballs — Taylor Swift is not the hapless victim of a bot campaign,” one TikTok with 418,000 views begins. “You just don’t have any media literacy and you got bamboozled.”
On the other end of the spectrum, a separate TikTok user shared a video that amounted to “I told you so,” defending Swift and sharing the Rolling Stone piece. “So many opportunities to be smug this year,” the caption read. “I am taking all of them.”
And it all started with a bare-bones report that threw gasoline on a perpetual fire.
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