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.
