Democrats are reportedly coordinating activity on Reddit and abusing X Community Notes<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Kamala Harris\u2019 and Tim Walz\u2019s campaign staff have organized \u201castroturf\u201d operations on the social media platform Reddit and conspired to manipulate the Community Notes feature on X, according to an American researcher.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cAstroturfing\u201d is a term used to describe manufactured content posing as authentic, named after the artificial soil used at American sporting venues, as opposed to real, \u201cgrassroots\u201d support.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Harris-Walz campaign \u201cfraudulently games Community Notes with sock puppet accounts and astroturf tactics. And we have the screenshots and spreadsheets and campaign comms to prove it,\u201d Sean Davis, founder of the outlet Federalist, posted on Wednesday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Davis was citing a series<\/a> of articles<\/a> by a researcher going by the handle \u2018Reddit Lies\u2019, including screenshots taken from the Harris-Walz server on the messaging platform Discord, purporting to show how the Democrats conspired to swamp social media with their content, while suppressing criticism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In one example, Democratic National Committee employee Timothy Durigan instructed campaign volunteers to vote down a Community Note that flagged a post by the @KamalaHQ account as inaccurate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Community Notes project was rolled out by Elon Musk after he purchased Twitter \u2013 since renamed X \u2013 in 2022, as a way to flag inaccurate or misleading posts without resorting to censorship. According to \u2018Reddit Lies\u2019, multiple official Harris-Walz accounts have \u201cregularly provided dishonest presentations\u201d of their rivals, former President Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance, to the point where even CNN called them out. Yet \u201cvirtually none\u201d of their \u201cfalse and misleading tweets\u201d have Community Notes \u2013 most likely because of a coordinated campaign to vote them down, the researcher said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Harris-Walz Discord has a \u201cTwitter (X) Community Notes Training\u201d module, which teaches users how to increase their score and urges them to downrank notes that call out inaccurate claims by Democrats, according to screenshots published by the Federalist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While the campaign may have had success in keeping Community Notes off their misleading posts, it has not been able to manipulate the system to the extent it wanted, \u2018Reddit Lies\u2019 said, citing a post in which one of the organizers lamented X\u2019s safeguards.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The campaign also appears to be using a tool called Reach to propagate its messages across multiple platforms, running afoul of \u201ccoordinated inauthentic behavior\u201d bans intended to stop \u2018Russian bots\u2019 that the Democrats allege have interfered in US elections.<\/p>\n\n\n\n