Harris campaign scrambles to hide alleged manipulation of social media to make itself look popular

Two months after the Harris-Walz presidential campaign got caught changing news headlines in its ads on Google to make the nominees look favorable to the Democratic ticket, prompting a GOP congressman to demand answers from Google, an anonymous sleuth detailed another campaign effort to apparently manufacture the appearance of popularity on a tech platform that's already heavily progressive.

The campaign is manipulating Reddit's algorithm in violation of platform rules, "Reddit Lies" wrote in a screenshot-laden expose in The Federalist on Tuesday morning that apparently prompted a scramble among the campaign and volunteers to hide the effort.

By early afternoon they took down the "Reddit Organizing" spreadsheet used to coordinate "the astroturfing campaign," as Reddit Lies called it, though another user posted an archive of it. A list of roles in the operation is no longer public, requiring approval from the owner to see it.

Screenshots show the campaign's Discord server, used to direct volunteers, "paused" its Reddit and Meme channels "as a security measure" and locked its "Amplify Messaging" channels.

The moderators of Reddit's 8 million-member politics message board, known as a subreddit, removed The Federalist report itself when a user posted it. The headline – "The Harris Campaign Manipulates Reddit to Control the Platform" – allegedly violates the board's rules.

"I found that 126 of the top 1,000 posts in the past month on r/Politics were posted by official Harris-Walz campaign volunteers," Reddit Lies wrote. On Oct. 17, about a quarter of the top posts on the politics subreddit were by self-identified campaign volunteers, a screenshot shows.

"It looks like Federalist is poking around the server here and claiming its [sic] being used for misinformation," a Discord user who moderates several subreddits, including the 131,000-member AgainstHateSubreddits, wrote on the server – one of several screenshots that Reddit Lies received and posted Tuesday showing the internal reaction to the expose.

Reddit Lies promised two more Federalist reports on the investigation, focused on the campaign using social media to "spread election disinformation, and skirt election laws."

The author declined to say more about themselves when asked by Just the News.

"Honestly there's little reason to write an article about me specifically," the person wrote in an X direct message. "What matters is the truth above all. All glory to God."

The allegations bring to mind those of X against Media Matters for America for manipulating its algorithm to trigger major brands' ads to appear next to antisemitic posts, falsely painting the pairings as common to scare off advertisers. MMFA laid off at least a dozen staffers following X's lawsuit, which a federal judge recently refused to dismiss.

Reddit did not answer Just the News queries Tuesday on whether the behavior violates its rules.

"While it’s possible that their accounts will be banned when their actions come to light, it is also entirely possible that Reddit is giving the Harris-Walz campaign free rein to violate the rules," Reddit Lies wrote, pointing to its CEO Steve Huffman's comments in 2018 that "Reddit could sway elections … if we really wanted to" but "wouldn’t do it, of course."

Also Tuesday, Pirate Wires documented a monthslong campaign by Wikipedia editors to apparently create pages portraying Trump as a fascist – the least subtle on Sept. 21, the same day the U.K. Guardian posted a sprawling essay titled "Is Donald Trump a Fascist?" Just two editors created nearly all that page's content, "suggesting a tightly coordinated effort to control the narrative."

This is significant because "radical ideologies are laundered by Wikipedia into the mainstream," said PirateWires, founded by venture capitalist Mike Solana. "The key to this is Google, which boosts Wikipedia articles to the top of search results, and often includes a knowledge panel that gives the appearance they’ve been vetted by the search giant, even though they aren’t."

Platform bias and manipulation are frequent Republican and conservative allegations this campaign season, with GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump accusing Google of showing only negative stories about him and positive stories of Democratic nominee Kamala Harris. 

House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, pressed Google on its lawyer's apparent conflict-of-interest by preparing Harris for debate while fighting the Justice Department's antitrust case against the company. House Oversight Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., opened a probe of whether Google misled Americans about the first Trump assassination attempt.

Amazon said its voice assistant Alexa erred by giving users reasons to vote for Harris but telling them it couldn't do the same for Trump because it cannot support a "specific politician."

Harris for President staffers post "Daily Messaging Guidance" in the form of favored articles, data and talking points to its Discord server's Reddit channel, which gets added to the Reddit Organizing spreadsheet, according to the expose by Reddit Lies, whose X bio cites Ephesians 5:11: "Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them."

From there, the campaign's most Reddit-savvy volunteers consult their own database of more than 100 communities on the platform to decide where to post each bit of content, using "a calculated, sequential post timing metric to avoid Reddit’s built-in spam filters," as documented by their own Discord conversations on "ban-avoidance tactics," the article states.

Volunteers then add the links to the organizing spreadsheet so that others can "flood the post with likes and comments," triggering Reddit's algorithm to "make the post appear in more user timelines," a term known as "brigading," the anonymous author wrote.

"Beyond r/Politics, they also target swing state subreddits, which tend to be a lot smaller in number and far less strictly moderated" and "streamlines the process of targeting them with Harris-Walz supplied messaging," Reddit Lies wrote. About 10% of top posts in this subreddit collection came from campaign volunteers Oct. 13-20.

Campaign digital organizing manager Gabrielle Lynn notified the Discord server Oct. 4 of a "NEW subreddit tracker to help maximize our impact on Reddit," the organizing spreadsheet, created with help from a Discord user known as "apfel4harris (NY/abroad)."

Reddit Lies said another X user notified him of aplfel4harris using the server to recruit Reddit users to the "#No Access team" to post and boost "breaking, informative and positive" Harris-Walz news, "campaign-generated memes and screenshots" to large subreddits such as politics, technology and news, using the hashtag #online-engagement-welcome.

"I infiltrated it a few weeks ago," Reddit Lies told another X user, cautioning that this was "only one astroturfing operation" and the campaign's true influence is "potentially far higher."

The practice is "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," and "in many cases" violates a platform's terms of service, the author wrote.