A new study has revealed that Taylor Swift was the victim of coordinated bot attacks that attempted to paint the singer as a Nazi. The bot creators generated the attacks to encourage outrage among real people online, thus spreading the false narrative even further. The attacks came shortly after Taylor Swift released her latest album, The Life of a Showgirl, in October. The study conducted by the behavioral intelligence platform GUDEA, examined more than 24,000 social media posts and 18,000 accounts across 14 platforms between the day of her album’s release. October 4, and October 18. “A key finding of this analysis is the role inauthentic narratives played in triggering authentic engagement,” GUDEA wrote. “The false narrative that Taylor Swift was using Nazi symbolism did not remain confined to fringe conspiratorial spaces; it successfully pulled typical users into comparisons between Swift and Kanye West. (…) GUDEA went on to explain, “While the majority of users behaved typically, 3.77 percent exhibited non-typical behavior amplifiers and accounted for 28 percent of the conversation volume, suggesting coordinated influence.” This bot behavior led to typical users who would not normally engage with conspiracy content participating in the conversation, thereby spreading the misinformation. A coordinated bot attack to smear Taylor Swift’s reputation could lead to similar, more dangerous maneuvers by bad actors “That’s part of the goal for these types of narratives, for whoever is pushing them,” GUDEA founder and CEO Keith Presley told Rolling Stone. “Especially with these inflammatory ones – that’s going to get rewarded by the algorithm. You’ll see the influencers jump on first, because it’s going to get them clicks.” Georgia Paul, GUDEA’s head of customer success, pointed out another concern: that the bot attack on Taylor Swift could serve as a test for a way to fraudulently influence voters.
via brobible: Taylor Swift Was A Victim Of Coordinated Bot Attacks Created To Spread Narrative That She Is A Nazi
siehe auch: Coordinated online attack sought to suggest Taylor Swift promoted Nazi ideas, research finds Thousands of social media posts were traced to deliberate attempts to misrepresent the singer – and showed ‘significant user overlap’ with the campaign to attack actor Blake Lively Analysis has found that a coordinated online attack sought to align Taylor Swift and her latest album, The Life of a Showgirl, with Nazi and rightwing imagery and values, from accounts feigning leftist critique and designed to encourage outrage. The AI-driven behavioural intelligence platform Gudea produced a report examining more than 24,000 posts and 18,000 accounts across 14 social media platforms between 4 October, the day of the album’s release, and 18 October. These posts accused Swift of sowing dogwhistle references in her lyrics and alleged that a lightning bolt-style necklace from her merchandise line – a reference to the album track Opalite – resembled SS insignia. The report concluded that 3.77% of accounts drove 28% of discussion of Swift in the period, chiefly conspiracy theories that also made allegations about her supposed ties to the Maga movement and criticisms framing her engagement to American football player Travis Kelce as “trad” or conservative. In a spike that took place between 6 and 7 October, 35% of posts in the dataset came from bot-like accounts. Gudea said that while they didn’t uncover the identity of those responsible, they found “a significant user overlap between accounts pushing the Swift ‘Nazi’ narrative and those active in a separate astroturf campaign attacking Blake Lively”, the actor involved in an ongoing sexual harassment lawsuit against actor and director Justin Baldoni – and a once close friend of Swift’s. The data, said Gudea, “reveals a cross-event amplification network, one that disproportionately influences multiple celebrity-driven controversies and injects misinformation into otherwise organic conversations”. The allegations about Swift were initially disseminated on more niche online spaces such as 4chan and then migrated to mainstream social media apps – and were then unwittingly spread by the public and algorithms. “The false narrative that Taylor Swift was using Nazi symbolism did not remain confined to fringe conspiratorial spaces; it successfully pulled typical users into comparisons between Swift and Kanye West,” the researchers wrote. “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.”
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