The Harris-Walz campaign is reportedly manipulating the social media platform Reddit and breaking the rules in order to control the narrative on the site and make Vice President Kamala Harris appear more popular than she actually is, according to a new investigation by the Federalist.
While Reddit is a notoriously leftist platform infamous for its censorship of a large community of Trump supporters, Harris’s campaign is deploying its staffers to manipulate the site’s algorithm even further via a massive “astroturfing” operation, which is in direct violation of platform’s Terms of Service, according to a report by the Federalist.
The term “astroturfing” refers to a fake grassroots campaign, which involves campaign staffers or volunteers posing as ordinary people to create the illusion that there is more support being expressed in favor of a particular candidate or issue than there actually is.
“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 Federalist noted.
When this strategy is used on Amazon, it can manipulate people to buy certain products, thinking they are more popular than they are. When the same strategy is deployed for elections, it can reward a falsely advertised candidate with more votes.
The Harris-Walz campaign reportedly keeps a spreadsheet to track of its astroturfing efforts, which involves staffers spamming the “Politics” subreddit (reddit forums on a particular topic) — and other subreddits — with pro-Harris propaganda, and then having volunteers who pretend to be random users who just so happened to stumble upon the content post favorable comments.
The Federalist accessed the campaign’s Discord server and found that every weekday morning paid Democrat staffer Gabrielle Lynn communicates a “Daily Messaging Guidance” for Reddit, which usually consists of articles and data that the Harris-Walz campaign wants to boost, and “key messaging” that campaign volunteers need to stick to.
This information is assembled by official Harris-Walz staffers and is added to a Google Spreadsheet titled “Reddit Organizing.” From there, volunteers called “Lead Posters” — who are Reddit savvy — choose what they think will best resonate with users on the platform.
After posting to Reddit, the campaign’s Lead Posters then go back to the spreadsheet and update it with links to their posts, so that campaign volunteers can then spam the posts with likes and comments, making them appear more active, which then triggers the site’s algorithm to make the content more visible to users.
Harris-Walz campaign volunteers are reportedly working with a database of more than 100 subreddits that they target with campaign propaganda.
“Kamala’s posters, however, don’t simply spam links haphazardly. They use a calculated, sequential post timing metric to avoid Reddit’s built-in spam filters,” the Federalist reported.
Given that this activity violates Reddit’s Terms of Service, Harris-Walz campaign volunteers often discuss how to avoid getting banned while they spam the platform and carry out their astroturfing agenda, according to internal Discord chats obtained by the Federalist.
With regards to how effective this shady strategy has been, the Federalist noted that the Harris-Walz campaign’s own data reveals that over the course of 15 days, its volunteers were able to make 2,551 posts to Reddit, which have so far garnered more than 5.7 million upvotes and 418,000 comments.
Staffers and volunteers posing as regular individuals and spamming Reddit with propaganda and false favorability is clearly an effort by the Harris-Walz campaign to manipulate votes in the 2024 presidential election.
Read the full report at the Federalist here.
Alana Mastrangelo is a reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow her on Facebook and X at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.