There Are No Girls on the Internet - Bot Campaigns Turned Taylor Swift Into a Nazi and Cracker Barrel Into a Culture War

Episode Date: December 17, 2025

If you’ve ever looked at your timeline and thought “there’s no way this is real,” you’re probably right.  In this episode, Bridget and Mike speak to two data professionals about two recent reports from their companies that shed light on how bot networks attempt to hijack our online discourse: the Taylor Swift Nazi narrative after the release of Swift’s album Life of a Showgirl and the Cracker Barrel logo change backlash. Through the lens of these two seemingly unrelated campaigns, we unpack how bot-driven narratives spread, why it works, how online culture wars get engineered for clicks, chaos, and control, and what it means for the rest of us humans trying to engage in actual discourse online.    If you’re listening on Spotify, you can leave a comment there to let us know what you think, or email us at [e-mail]    Follow Bridget and TANGOTI on social media!  ||  instagram.com/bridgetmarieindc/ || tiktok.com/@bridgetmarieindc ||  youtube.com/@ThereAreNoGirlsOnTheInternet || bsky.app/profile/tangoti.bsky.social   See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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but dig a little bit deeper and they share something important in common. Both controversies were amplified by coordinated bot campaigns that sought to rile up ordinary users and draw them into conversation. In this episode, we're breaking down two reports on coordinated bot campaigns, one aimed at Taylor Swift, another aimed at Cracker Barrel, to talk about what happens when online outrage is manufactured, amplified, and weaponized, as well as what it means for the authentic human voices trying to be heard against the algorithmic roar. because if bots can create the appearance of consensus and generate real backlash or controversy at scale, how do any of us know when we're reacting to real people or just reacting exactly the way somebody wanted us to? This is what Molly Dwyer has spent her career researching. She describes herself as a kind of professional internet vibe checker, but her real title is Director of Insights at Peak Metrics.

And before the internet was talking about bots manipulating conversations around Taylor Swift, Molly had been looking into how similar kinds of inauthentic behavior was driving the discourse around the old-timey country-themed chain restaurant, Cracker Barrel. Now, I know it may seem wild to think that anybody would care deeply about this, but Molly says it's yet another instance of how easily the internet can be manipulated to change people's views. Her company, Peak Metrics, was not involved with the report about Taylor Swift. But a few months earlier, they published a report about the Cracker Barrel Contribal. that had a lot of similar findings. So we asked her about what was happening with the Cracker Barrel discourse and got her take on the recent Taylor Swift report.

I spent a number of years living in Russia on various U.S. State Department programs to help young people study languages that are critical for national security. I say that's relevant because my first kind of experience of how the Internet can manipulate and change people's view on the world was my experience sort of pre and post- 2014 in Russia, where I watched people that I knew personally go through quite a transformation on their perspective on Ukraine and the U.S. in a very short period of time. So that really kicked off kind of my interest in this idea of like information operations, how did the things that we consume on the internet impact our worldview, whether we're aware of it or not.

Immediately out of that, I went to work for a small startup that does open source intelligence, which is really just another way of talking about all of the data that is publicly available on the internet. There's a pretty big tool set out there nowadays for different technologies that will help you quantify and qualify what is being said, what is being researched on the internet. And I've had a decade of experience in that open source intelligence tool space at this point. Now, the internet of we're going into 2026, the internet of 2026 is very different than the internet of 2026. 16 when I first started out in this industry. Traditional metrics that we were used to like volume or sentiment or even just taking for

granted the idea that a verified page was who they say they are are just no longer applicable nowadays. And I think that the internet has fundamentally changed from under us, I think, especially obviously since the rise of LLMs and agentic AI. And we're all just sort of grappling and trying to figure out what this means for us and my role at Peak Metrics is to help companies and other organizations figure out what the internet means for them. Before we started recording, you said that you basically were an internet vibe checker that, I mean, I, it's one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you is that I have had

the experience of seeing a conversation kind of take hold of the internet very quickly, much more quickly than at other kind of organic conversations. And maybe you don't know something is going up, but you suspect, right? Things where I would think, who really is dedicating their time to writing a bunch of posts about this? Who really cares about this? These conversations where your spidey senses kind of get tingling. Is that sort of what you mean?

Exactly. I think we all have an innate sense of the Internet, but because we don't have easily understandable metrics to understand how big is this conversation. am I seeing this because of my own algorithmic bubble? Are other people seeing this? And what are the motivations for people to participate in this conversation? I'll give you an example of maybe sort of the algorithmic bubbles that we live in. Last year, I remember there were a lot of media inquiries to look at the impact of,

I was the first or second presidential debate with Kamala Harris as the candidate. And I was looking at the scale of conversation to that. relative to something that I had not heard of, but someone on my team brought forward to me, which was the plight of this squirrel that was like a pet squirrel that was going to be put down in New York State that Trump entered the conversation on. And I, in my algorithmic bubble, had not heard of this. I was focused on reporting on the metrics around discussions around the debate. And when I actually went to go look at just the overall volume of conversation around those two topics on X, the volume of conversation around the volume of conversation around

the squirrel was multiple X larger than the volume of the conversation around the presidential debate. So I think that anecdote illustrates sometimes both our algorithmic bubbles and just like how big these conversations can get quickly when certain players are involved. Like when certain big influencers enter the conversation and then also thinking about like when bots are involved, right? Like what type of content are they incentivized to post about? and to amplify for, you know, their ultimate goals probably of monetization.

Molly's background in Russian makes sense here, because there was a time that when you talked about bot campaigns online, the assumption was it was being done by foreign bad actors, the kind of sophisticated manipulation campaign that we associate with an adversarial foreign country. But today, things have really changed. So I think if you take the Occam's Rager approach to the Internet, which is just assuming that everything is a money-making grift, you'll probably be correct in like 90% of cases.

And I think that that applies here. I'll back up a little bit to talk about like bot networks in general. And I think that this is important to cover before we get into who is behind it. So traditionally when we would talk about bot networks and who is operating them, you know, the degree of sophistication required to set up these campaigns to run these accounts simultaneously to get them to stay on topic with their posting, you were looking at a relatively limited set of essentially state adversary actors, like the big bads that were used to, Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, right,

that had the sophisticated, like, cyber teams that could run these campaigns. And that's why I think in our minds we're still a little bit stuck in this idea of, like, okay, big, bad foreign actors manipulating the conversation. I think there are still big bad foreign actors manipulating the conversation, and they have a lot of incentives to do so. But the world changed with AI, and it's now easier than ever to run these types of campaigns. The other side of that was you had maybe like traditional non-state cyber actors,

like threat network, you know, a non-type people who were super sophisticated could do this, right? And now, you know, smaller governments can like run a campaign to prop up their dictator, right? average people who are not part of like a threat network can stand up campaigns like this thanks to AI, you know, run them simultaneously. And I think that's where we get into this explanation of, okay, well, if it's not ideological the way that like a state adversary actor would be, well, why are they doing this? I think shits and giggles is always a reasonable guess. But I think that money is the thing that makes the most sense. And I'll tell you why I think that worldview I think is bearing out recently. So I don't know if you saw in the past few weeks that X made an update where user locations were published.

And what we saw, this is again anecdotal. I don't necessarily have the data on this, but what we saw anecdotally was that a lot of accounts that were posting incendiary political content on both the left and the U.S. right were coming from places like India, the global south, places where, you know, are relatively, low income, the money that you could make from this is not insignificant. We don't necessarily think that these people have ideological reasons to fan discourse in the U.S. It just so happens that that's maybe a good way to make a side hustle online because of the way that engagement is monetized. So that's my overview answer of like the types of people who could be behind these. It's a much larger set of actors than it was maybe four years ago. But I still think that money is probably the guiding principle of what's going on here. Yeah, we've been having a lot of conversations about

that change at X. And I think it really helped me see, I knew this sort of inside, but it helped, it was just like another way to sort of crystallize exactly what you said, that we're so used to thinking about nefarious actors, bad actors who are manipulating our online discourse to foment chaos and confusion and political division. But also, in making this, in changing the financial payouts of X, they certainly have incentivized people to post inflammatory, incendiary content, rage bait, right? Content that we know works as a revenue stream. And part of me can't even really blame them for being like, oh, they set up this, this incentivized. reason for me to do this to make them little money.

I need money. I'm going to do it. Yeah, we just happen to be a big, very flammable target for people to go after on the internet, U.S. society. Yes. If you haven't been on a long car trip in a while, I bet you haven't spent a lot of time thinking about the restaurant Cracker Barrel.

So here's the controversy. Earlier this year, Cracker Barrel rolled out a new logo. Previously, the logo featured an old white man, in overalls casually leaning over a barrel. But this new logo removed the old man and just kept the name Cracker Barrel in an ever-so-slightly sleeker font, one that maybe jive with a younger audience. To be sure, this is the kind of boring corporate marketing change that most people wouldn't even notice.

But in today's climate, where every little thing can be turned into evidence of a woke agenda, it became an entire new cycle. Okay, so you've really set the stage wonderfully. I think I mentioned this to you that independently we had been wanting to do an episode about bots and sort of the general grip that they have on our discourse. And one of the conversations that I saw that I was like, this is a very weird conversation happening, was Cracker Barrel changing their logo. I grew up in the South and my parents went to Cracker Barrel. We had one in our town. They went every week.

But other than my parents, I don't think I've ever heard anybody mention Cracker Barrel. It wasn't like a big part of the discourse. So imagine my surprise when one day I wake up and everybody's freaking talking about Cracker Barrel. Then I saw the peak metrics report about the way that bots might have helped shape the way that conversation spread online. How did that come to be something that Peak Metrics was looking at? Yeah, I too can't believe that we're still talking about Cracker Barrel.

But here we are. I think why media latched onto it when we put out some initial findings was this sense of why are we talking about this. And we gave them some numbers to chew on to help them understand what degree of this conversation is potentially inorganic or automated that might explain why it's staying in the discourse

longer than we would expect it to be or why it rose to the top of the discourse in the first place. And I think our key finding there was that you know, within the first, first 24 hours of this like rage cycle, we found that the original posts that seeded this idea of a boycott. And you got to rewind it back because I think that's also another principle that's hard to do on the modern internet is how did something start? There's not necessarily an easy answer to that.

You have to, you have to bring in a lot of data, search for the right stuff to figure out how a trend even started. From what we could see, how the idea of a boycott started, it did start from what our tech would classify as organic accounts. But very quickly, those calls for a boycott were amplified by accounts that we flagged as automated or inorganics. So there was this sort of like seeding introduction of a claim that immediately got amplified. And at the height of the discourse, like within the first 24 hours, we found that basically half of the posts that we're calling for a boycott were coming. were coming from accounts that we flagged as automated. Half is a big number.

But we also don't necessarily, at the time that we published that report, we didn't have a lot of comparison points. I think that's key to maybe understanding what's going on with the Taylor Swift discourses. I think we're all across the industry, like finding these numbers and trying to figure out what they mean. If I were to give you a spitey sense now, several months after Cracker Barrel,

is that when there's a incendiary conversation online, I would consider like a normal baseline for the amount of automated activity in that conversation to be somewhere between 20 to 30% of the conversation. Wow. And it typically will go higher than that when we hit like a crisis point. So like the cracker barrel changes its logo, organic accounts see this call for a boycott, and then it jumps up. But that may just be a symptom of how the internet works and not necessarily a symptom of,

of a coordinated campaign to target chain restaurants that are abandoning traditional values, right? I think we're grasping these numbers. We're putting a number to this thing for the first time, and so we're trying to figure out what is baseline at this point. So what's the takeaway that you all found from the Crockerboro Report? I think the takeaway here is, you know, one and two being automated, that's a big number, but that's still a lot of people that have potentially big, real feelings about this. The other element that's at play here, though, is because of how algorithmic boosting works, how many of those people who were real people posting outrage would have even seen this to post their outrage had it not first been amplified by inorganic accounts that brought it to the top of their feed.

So even within that number of people with big, real human feelings, there is an element of being shaped by this inorganic discourse. bringing that conversation to them in the first place. I saw an analogy to this that if you were cutting vegetables in your kitchen and you cut your finger and you ask somebody next to you, hand me that towels so I can not apply pressure. If they squeezed it instead so that you bled faster, they didn't start the cut, but they certainly made it worse. They certainly brought the problem, you know, to a different level. And that's sort of a good way to think about how bots and inauthentic activity can shape

a conversation online that might actually be seated with organic people and their big feelings they're sharing on the internet. Now I'm just thinking in my head of what all of the potential bots would say if you ask them to hand you a towel. Because I find that you can, you can spot them in the comments section of like they'll take things to literally sometimes. So it would be, you know, like something about the, something about the towel, something about like not being able to squeeze your finger. I think there was a key point in time where we saw some of the bot networks like short circuit with their instructions about what to post at the piece. peak of the Trump Epstein files controversy where in real time, I'm not the only person you saw

this. I don't know if there's anything written about this, but other people were observing this that a lot of these seemingly MAGA accounts were turning on Trump in the context of like calling for the Epstein files to be released because you can tell that they're like pre-programmed instructions were to like nonstop call for the Epstein files to be released. And they short-circited a little bit based on their previous instructions for the world before, you know, they got updated to the version of the world that existed at that point in time. It's hard out there for a bot. I don't blame the bots for being kids.

I am not a bot and I get confused. I feel bad for these bots that are like, I don't even know what to post anymore. Yeah, yeah. I think if people are wondering, you know, like, what is a good way to confirm your spidey sense of something in Israel? I mean, I think we're all used to like those account handles that are like John 24560, whatever, right? Like, we know that that's a common way

that those account names are formulated. We do still see that. But I think even without any other technology to flag automated behavior, what you can do is if you're like on your phone and just scroll a couple of times, if you're still scrolling and you have not reached yesterday in that person's posting,

you know, that's probably a sign that they are posting at a frequency that is just not probably humanly possible. and is probably, you know, an automated posting rate that's going out there. So that's my tip of one of the simplest ways to be like, is it a bot? Yeah, just scroll back and see how far it takes you to get to yesterday. That is a great tip. And yeah, don't spend, don't dedicate your time and energy to getting into a back and forth with a bot

or like worrying yourself with what a bot is saying. Unless you're doing it because you're a researcher and you're interested, don't have it like fuck up your day what a bot left. in your comments on Instagram or something. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think we're talking about X, and I do think that X is pretty central to, like, the discourse in the sense that it really is, like,

the most fertile ground for bot behavior. Like, it's very text-based, which means it's, like, easier to, you know, produce content there. Like, it's a little bit harder to automate, like, posting of pictures if you think about it, like, just logistically. So I think we do still see a lot of bots. activity on X where I think researchers are less familiar with what bot activity looks like on other platforms. I will say that, you know, I'm seeing a lot of folks going to more niche communities

like Facebook groups or Discord or Reddit where I think that there's a desire for people to like be in conversation with real people on the internet. And when they're finding that that's not possible in certain forums anymore, they're moving to different. places to try to be assured that when they're engaging in conversation with someone that, yeah, it's not like a bot who's arguing back at them. Especially in this age of AI, I want to know, even if we're having a spicy conversation or like an argument, I want it to be with a real person like in Des Moines, Iowa or something. I don't want to have the feeling of like, what am I wasting my time going back and forth

on Reddit with a bot? No, thank you. Let's take a quick break. Another podcast from some SNL, late-night comedy guy, not. Quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and headwriter, Streeter Seidel, help an acapella band with their between songs banter. There's that worst singer in the group? The worst? Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation to the group. The yard herds, right? That's the name.

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Listen to Superhuman on the I-Hard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. At our back. Since Molly is an internet vibe shop, I wanted to know her thoughts on the report around the controversy surrounding Taylor Swift, things like accusations that Swift is a secret trad wife or even secretly a Nazi. So I want to talk about the report that I'm sure you've seen by now that was put out by a company called Gidea, that was then reported on in Rolling Stone that looked into social media commentary around Taylor Swift's latest album

and whether or not that commentary was in part driven by inauthentic coordinated accounts. What was your reaction, just as somebody who puts together reports like this, who somebody who was in this space, what was your reaction to that report? I mean, I think it was a spidey sentence check. I am not a Swifty. Please don't come after me, Swifties. My wife is a Swifty. But I, as a person on the internet, had seen the reactions to Taylor Swift's album.

Now, at the time I was not discriminating whether I thought that those reactions were organic or inorganic. but I was aware of the pushback to the most recent album. And looking through the methodology, it makes sense to me. I think it's sound in certain aspects of it. And I think maybe where sometimes the nuance gets lost is, you know, we talk about how one part of a conversation is automated or manipulated. And that's not to discount the other part of the conversation that has real people having real big human feelings here. And inherently in whether it's data sampling or, you know,

the way that your technology, whether it's by keywords or something else, is identifying the parts of the discourse. You're going to more easily identify the parts of the discourse that like sound automated to begin with because they're flagging like the right keywords or the right markers for what's going on. And inherently you're going to miss the more nuanced conversations because people, when real people talk about issues, they're all using slightly different language to describe what's going on. They're maybe not referencing like Taylor Swift's full name in the conversation. They're replying. So inherently in the work that we do based on how you're going to collect this data, it's already going to veer a little bit more towards missing some of those more organic

conversations because of how humans talk about things. So something got lost down the road. in terms of the real people having real human feelings about this. I don't disagree based on the methodology that there are certainly indicators of automated activity here, but we don't necessarily know, going back to the earlier question, you know, these bot networks that were, you know, jumping on the bandwagon here,

that also were attacking Blake lively. You know, we don't necessarily know what the incentives are of these bot networks. Are they just hopping on the lake? latest celebrity trend to gain traction and monetization? Or are they targeted against certain celebrities? Like, these are unknown questions at this point. So I think we want to make sure to not jump too many steps forward to claim that billionaire Taylor Swift is being targeted and we need to protect her from attacks online. There are a lot of other people who are being targeted who

don't necessarily have Taylor Swift's PR arsenal at their back. Yes, I'm so glad that you brought that up because, I mean, I don't know if you've, I mean, I'm sure you've seen the way the conversation around this report has spread online. And one of the things that I've been a little frustrated to see is people saying, oh, well, this report confirms that everybody who was critical of Taylor Swift was just a bot. They can, they can, or people who were, you know, manipulated by bots. all of that discourse can be dismissed. So first of all, the report does not say that.

Not even a little. In fact, something that I think is getting lost in the sauce of the report is that, in fact, the report is talking about authentic accounts having authentic discourse alongside what they have seen as, like, perhaps inauthentic discourse. So, like, nowhere in that report are they saying everybody who was critical of Taylor Swift can just be dismissed as a bot. And I think that there's something about the way it was reported that is not giving enough credence to the fact that there were, there were and are real people in this

conversation who are not box, who have been talking about Taylor Swift critically for a long time. And so even though, you know, I'm no data scientist, but looking at their methodology, I don't think, I don't think they've made this up. I don't think Taylor Swift paid them to put this reporting together or something like that. But I understand what people are saying, when they're saying, this report does not actually reflect the fact that there are so, many people authentically being critical of Taylor Swift on the internet were not bots. I think something about the way the report was framed sort of gave credence to this idea that you could just be dismissive of all of these critical voices. Exactly. I mean, I think on the

flip side, we could look at any other recent controversial issue and perhaps come to a similar conclusion of, wow, this conversation is bot driven. Because I think that that may just be a symptom of like how the internet functions nowadays that may not necessarily be specific to the dynamics of Taylor Swift. I think the other thing that you can do, and I mean, I'm taking lessons from this, you know, working and researching in this space is, you know, one of the, one of my favorite ways to set folks up to analyze conversations online with peak metrics technology is I'll say, you know, look at the data and ask the same question filtered to the organic activity and the non-organic activity so that you can see the nuance and the difference and maybe like the specific

themes or narratives that they're talking about. So an interesting question to ask of this data might have been within the controversial conversation around the latest album, which one specifically were the bots trying to push? And then when it comes to real human people, which aspects were they focused on. Presenting, I think, maybe those two things side by side gives us better context for what those people who were having real human feelings about this were thinking, which aspects of the album controversy were they latching onto the most? And how did that perhaps differ from what the bots were focused on? And I think there's also, I mean, I can't not talk about the way that this seems to, the conversation seems to be happening along some clear racial lines to me, where a lot of the voices

who were critical of Taylor Swift, not all, but a lot were women of color, black women, people of color. And a lot of the Swifty community appeared to be, again, not all, but a lot of white ladies, white people. And so I think it's just one of those issues that will always sit at these tension points of the tensions that we know exist in our society. Something about the report giving credence to the idea that you could just discount a largely the critical voices of largely minoritized people

because you love Taylor Swift and you don't have to think critically about the points these people are making because they're bots. I can see why that this hit people sideways. Yeah, and I think to keep the organic voices anonymized here, I think that might have been a great opportunity to look at the people on the organic side of the conversation and see who were the biggest influencers in the space.

So within people who were criticizing the album or the aesthetics of Taylor Swift, and they were organic, you know, who were some of the biggest accounts that weighed in? Like, there are, you know, I'm aware that, like, black Twitter is a thing. Like, who were some of the biggest voices that were, that were shaping the conversation from the human side? What we may uncover if we looked at, like, you know, there might have been a post from someone who has, like, 500,000 followers. And arguably, that might have shaped the discourse a lot more. That single post from that person with a lot of reach might have shaped the discourse more.

than the 50 posts from bot accounts that have like 100 followers. So maybe there's some nuance to be parsed out here too, that volume doesn't necessarily equal impact or influence on the internet. And what bots are inherently trying to do is boost the volume of the conversation. But where humans have an impact, and there are also like automated accounts that look like influencer accounts that have lots of followers. but I'd like to pull the thread a little bit more about who are the influential people on the human side of the conversation.

That makes a lot of sense. And I guess I would have liked. I also think that, listen, we have said this quite around the show a million times. When you talk about, there's something about Taylor Swift that is like, once you start talking about her, big feelings come out on all sides. Even people who don't like Taylor Swift, it's like, there's just something about her that gets people talking. And so I think if you're going to be putting out a report that is about Taylor Swift, it would behoove you to make some. of this clear, right? It would be who of you to spend a little time explaining like, oh, well, who are the voices that we're seeing on the, like, who are the authentic voices that we're

seeing that are talking about her in this way and weighing in this way? Because you have to imagine it's going to get a lot of eyes on it. By now, everybody knows that when you talk about Taylor Swift, it's something that gets a lot of eyes or a lot of ears or whatever medium you're using. Yeah, if I maybe have three guideposts that I'm making up on the fly as an internet person, having been on Tumblr back in like the early 2010s, you knew not to mess with the Swifties

right? Like that's, so the guideposts of the internet is like what would we established? Like, assume it's a grift. What is the other one from that Netflix document? Don't fuck with cats. And I think maybe the third guidepost of the internet is do not touch

the Taylor Swift discourse with a 10-foot pole. if you follow these things, you can't go wrong on the internet. What do you think about the methodology that they used in this report to define bot accounts? I think it's challenging that we're using a common word that you could define in a lot of different ways. I think that there's no set methodology. I think a lot of different tech companies have different definitions and have their own sort of secret sauce when it comes to, you know, what available data they're using to come to these conclusions. I can tell you that, you know, from the way that we think about it coming from sort of a

framework of, you know, degrees of confidence that you would see in like the intelligence community, right? Like you're never going to say, I'm 100% sure that, you know, something is something you're going to say, okay, well, the available data that I have shows, you know, it's highly likely that this is a bot account. Even when you're getting into the highest degree of confidence that something is a bot account, the way that we frame it is that it's almost certainly a bot account, which is still, you know, by verbiage, a little bit short of saying, you know, for sure, because I think the only way to know for sure that something as a bot account is to do a lot of honestly, like, manual forensic analysis of that account. And the issue is that

you can't do that at scale. So when you're looking at large sets of data and you're looking at, you know, a limited availability of metrics that you have on these accounts. Honestly, I don't think it's necessarily the way that, you know, the bots are classified. It's the language that you're using to describe the confidence that these are bots. And again, I think there's something that's getting lost in translation between like a methodological report, journalistic reporting, and then where that journalistic reporting goes in the discourse. So we have, you know, things like account history, like when was the account created? We have the posting frequency.

you have like the profile image, right? Is that like a recycled image or an AI generated image? You know, we talked about like the obvious indicator of the way that the username is formulated. Are there other usernames like that that appear on other social media sites? What type of content is this account posting? Is it mainly acting as an amplifier and just resharing, reposting? Or is it doing a lot of original posts, which is just like, mechanically and also computationally from like an energy perspective going to be harder for like a bot run account to maintain posting of original content.

So I throw out all of these metrics to say that I think that the answer lies in probably a combination of all of them to get to the best answer. But I think we need to be really careful about the language that we're using when we say like the confidence level that we have that an account is is automated. One of the criticisms, and I mean, you've been, I think, helpfully kind of critical, good critical of the report. But some of the criticisms I'm seeing of people sort of just trying to trash this report and say that it's a lie is that on their site, they have a disclaimer that's like, oh, we cannot, we're not saying that we're not guaranteeing that what we say in these reports is true. And I thought to myself, well, this seems like standard cover your ass language to me that, like, of course they're not going to say with 100% certainty. Like what we're saying, you can take it to the bank, take it to your grave, 100% true. I didn't feel like that was necessarily a fair criticism of saying this report is full of lies.

It's bunk. Yeah. I mean, I think when you're stepping foot into measuring the internet, I think the issue is just that like what I'm finding is that media outlets are really hungry for any data that quantifies what's going on. Don't necessarily have folks in-house who can in fact check or verify that data. So you're really being, you know, it's a pretty big responsibility to be the person who is doing the research and the person who is presenting that research

to an organization that, you know, doesn't necessarily have the same tools at their disposal to interrogate it. I feel that responsibility, someone working in this space, which is why I will not touch the Taylor Swift Discourse with the 10-foot pole. This is the closest

that I will get. But it's a lot of responsibility, and I think all of the players need to be aware of that. More after a quick break. Another podcast from some SNL, late-night comedy guide, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends, me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan

to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman, help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel, help an Acapella band with their between songs banter. There's the worst singer in the group. The worst? Yeah.

Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The group. The yard birds, right? That's the name. The Harvard Yard. They're open.

Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle aged. One erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. Humor me. I need some jokes to make me seem funny.

Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ad-supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHeart's twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business. Think I-Hard. Streaming, radio, and podcasting.

Call 844-8-4-I-Hart to get started. That's 844-8-4-I-Hart. Last night, a blown call changed a game. This morning, the internet lost its mind. Highlights are trending, opinions are flying, and nobody's telling you exactly what happened. That's where Sports Slice comes in. I'm Timbo.

Every episode, we're cutting through the noise, breaking down the plays, the controversies, and the stories behind the headlines. We go straight to the source, the athlete themselves. Their locker room stories, their reactions, the stuff nobody gets to hear. The laughs, the drama, the triumphs,

the moments that never make the highlight real. From viral moments to historic games, from buzzer beaders to controversial calls, we break it down, give you context, and ask the questions everybody wants answered. Sports Slice brings you closer to the action with stories told by the people who live them. Listen to Sports Slice on the IHeart Radio app,

Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more, Follow Timbo Slica Life 12 and the TikTok podcast network on TikTok. Life throws hurdles big and small. The question is, how do you conquer them? On hurdle with Emily Abadi, we sit down with the most inspiring women in sports and wellness, professional athletes, coaches, and Olympic champions to talk about the challenges that shaped them and the mindset that keeps them going.

From the WNBA standout Kate Martin and rising hockey star Layla Edwards. If a boy can do it, I don't see why a girl can't. Like, I've never understood that. Like, it didn't make sense in my brain. It's hard to be in spaces that no one looks like you, but don't ever feel like you don't belong. Don't let that be the reason you don't do it. An Olympic champs Gabby Thomas and Katie Ladeki. The ability to show a gold medal to someone and have their face light up and smile,

that means the world to me. And that's what motivates me to win more gold medals. At our level, at this scale, like being able to fail in front of the entire world. Like, I can do anything. I can do anything. Because resilience isn't just about winning. It's about showing up, even when it's hard. Listen to Hurtle with Emily Abadi on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. Imagine an Olympics where doping is not only legal but encouraged. It's the enhanced games. Some call it grotesque. Others say it's unleashing human potential. Either way, the podcast's Superhuman documented it all, embedded in the games and with the athletes for a full year. Within probably 10 days, I'd put on 10 pounds. I was having trouble stopping the muscle growth.

Listen to Superhuman on the I-Hart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's get right back into it. In my opinion, the reason why this conversation started out from such a volatile place was that piece and rolling stone. So I read the report, I have a good sense of what's in it. Exactly what you were just saying, right? They're not necessarily saying this is getting. guaranteed, you know, all bots, whatever, whatever. The headline of the Rolling Stone report, which I believe is what most people read.

I don't think most people were going to the actual report. The headline was Taylor Swift's last album sparked bizarre accusations of Nazism. It was a coordinated attack. Having read the report, that's not even really what it said. It's so many steps too far. I don't know how many people are aware that right, like headlines are written by different people who write the article. you know, it's, it's almost like we've circled back to the thing that people have said for, you know, decades that they don't like about the media, right? Like, so this isn't necessarily an internet problem at this point that we're talking about.

This is a problem of, like, media and the common grievances that people have about how things are clickbaited. Yeah, I don't know that people know how pieces like this come to be. And I also think Rolling Stone, like, I saw people going back and saying, oh, well, when her album came out, Taylor Swift did a roll. Rolling Stone take over. They gave her album a five out of five. Like, being, and I don't think that that's, I think that that's fair to be part of the conversation is what relationship did Rolling Stone have with Taylor Swift before. And then like, why were they chosen to get this exclusive report about her being the target of this, this quote, coordinated attack? I don't think those questions are, are totally out of pocket. But I think it really goes to show like why you need to be so intentional and so careful when you're going to be

rolling out a report like this because people are going to run with it. Yeah, I mean, coming from this side, from the industry side, I would say, you know, there are two sides of how this could work. You know, sometimes we find something internally that's interesting and, you know, we shop it out to various media outlets and we say, like, is anyone interested in this cool data that we found? And sometimes it's the flip side. Sometimes it's an outlet coming to us that they're asking this question of a lot of different tech companies or researchers in the space and saying, hey, does anyone have an answer to this question? So that would be kind of my follow up from like the mechanics of the industry perspective is, was this report shopped around to a number of different outlets? And just it happened to be that Rolling Stone was the one who picked it up or was Rolling Stone calling different companies asking if anyone had any data?

on this. We didn't get a call from Rolling Stone asking if we had Taylor Swift data. So I can tell you that they did not call us for a consultation. But it is something that happens frequently. And sometimes I will exhaustively research something and, you know, work with the media organization about how to, you know, write an article about it. And sometimes that article doesn't even get published, right? So, you know, that's kind of the background of how this all works. So I'm not sure which dynamic was at play here. If I can jump in with another question here, I think this raises some good questions about the role of industry in making this kind of data available to the public. So, like, I come from a public health background where resources are pretty limited, right? And with the platforms shutting

down API access to researchers a couple years ago, and, you know, the Trump administration shifting resources away from a lot of funding mechanisms that were there in the past, the capacity of nonprofit public health researchers to do these kinds of investigations is really pretty limited. And so, you know, I've seen criticism online about this Taylor Swift report that, like, oh, it's a for-profit company. We can't trust anything that they say. But given, like, just the state of the world and how comprehensive. the internet is and the limited resources and capacity of people in public health,

I'm really like skeptical of an approach that says like, well, we just can't trust anything that comes out of industry whatsoever. It just feels like so limiting to shoot ourselves in the foot when, you know, I wish that we had companies like yours doing these kinds of analyses of public health topics instead of brands or celebrities. But, you know, it's just not there. And so I'm just, yeah, curious what you think about, you know, what is that relationship of, you know,

for-profit companies that are acting in private space, but then contributing to public conversation. How should members of the public think about that rule? That's a great question. We're getting like into the nitty-gritty of this industry, and I really like that. So I can tell you that I'm working on public. health problem sets for our customers, right? But that's not necessarily something that we're being

asked to report publicly about. So I think maybe to like lift the hood a little bit for the industry side is, you know, I'm working on a huge number of different customers from Fortune 500 to government to commercial to big PR and entertainment. And the only things that I end up being able to talk in public about are if that customer wants to, you know, do a public-facing report or if media asks us. And so that's why in the industry will say yes to media asks because that's a way to highlight our capabilities. And what does media typically ask about? It's typically politics or celebrities. So if you were to look at, you know, what are the issues that I've commented on in my in my in my current role over the past two years you would come to sort of the like

an odd conclusion that I am very into only pop culture and politics and this is a hundred percent of my work those just happen to be the issues that I'm able to talk about publicly because to be frank like a lot of these tech companies were were small I know peak metrics is still in like a startup role and so we don't necessarily have the timer resources to pull together the most interesting public-facing report on the most pressing issue. If we can't guarantee that it's going to get placement somewhere, that's a lot of energy and resources to expend on something. So that's why companies, you know, answer the call from media.

So media gets basically this free data and companies get free, you know, advertising of the types of things that they can do so that, you know, customers who have other types of problems that are not maybe pop culture or politics related call us up to say, hey, can you take a look at this issue for me? So that's the mechanics of like how this works. And I think the incentives, I don't think there, I think everyone should be skeptical of things that are coming always from private industry versus like academia and researchers. But we also don't really have like an established discipline of internet researchers. I think in academia to even, to even call from. I mean, you know, there's like the, I'm thinking correctly with the Shorenstein

Center at Harvard, you know, love all of their stuff that they publish. But I mean, it's an emerging field. And I think that's maybe why you have a sense that industry is leading the way is because I think that academia has not figured out where to carve this out yet. Oh, Molly, you just hit my, I'll just say I agree, because if you get me going. I, so formerly I was a research fellow at Brookman Klein, which is sort of a cousin to the Shorenstein Center at Harvard. People who do research on the internet in, from, in an academic way, attached to universities are having a rough time.

I'll just put it that way. And they're used, things used to be better. There used to be more funding. But if you do that kind of work and you're doing it today in 2025, God bless you. I am happy that you've got it figured out. But we have really hollowed out an entire space of researchers who are interested in what's happening on the internet. It's not a robust field any longer. I can definitely confirm that. But I'm really glad that you made this point about private companies versus academia and another space is because one of the criticisms I've seen online about this report, was that it's essentially Taylor Swift PR, right? That, you know, and they're talking about this in an almost nefarious way that, oh, this is just a company whose whole job

is to get good, positive press hits for brands and celebrities and things like that. And what's interesting to me is that from what you've said, it doesn't sound like that criticism is like totally wrong because in a kind of way, that's how these companies get their name out there so they can continue to fund, the other important work that they're doing,

but that like it's sort of missing the forest for the trees of what's actually going on in terms of how this research comes to that to get to the public. Do I have that sort of right? 100%. And I mean, I think if they were successfully doing PR plans for Taylor Swift, they would have a much more, you know, robust company at this point. And we would be able to tell that.

The roof would be in the pudding. I think, I guess one other element to talk about, like, well, we're just talking about, you know, the vibes of the internet is, you know, you talked about the hollowing out of, you know, academia on this. There's, you know, maybe fewer people in-house that news and media organizations have that are, like, internet experts and are given kind of like the time and resources to dig into this. I mean, if we're talking about, like, internet vibes and reporting on the internet as a beat, I feel like I have to mention Randy Zedrosny, who I respect. I respect.

her work so greatly. Getting to pitch peak metrics data to her and interact with her is like been one of the highlights of my career because that was that was the first time that I really saw the internet being reported on as like, hey, we're sending a reporter out to this location. No, we're sending a reporter like into the bowels of the internet to come back and tell us what's going on. And, you know, not every news organization has a brand new Zedrosny. And so that's why they call up companies like peak metrics to, you know, give them a sense of what is going on on the other side, which is, you know, this thing that we're all a part of. But you can't just walk away and, like, put your finger up in the air and say, like, as a matter of fact, this is what's happening?

One of the questions I was going to ask is, you know, what's the solution to this, to the way that bots are disrupting our discourse? And I was thinking of it as a question of like, what should platforms be doing or not doing? But it sounds like stepping back, the problem is so much more layered than platform X needs to do specific thing. It's a problem of media outlets. It's a problem of coverage. It sounds like a much more complex problem than just saying, oh, Elon Musk should decide to do this. That'll fix the problem. Yeah, I mean, we're going to continue probably to be in like an outrage clickbait cycle of,

hey, the bots were this big of a part of this conversation and what implications. does that have for the subject of this conversation. But, you know, until we get a sense of like what is the normal baseline level of bot activity, we're just going to kind of keep spinning on this wheel. So I'm hopeful that maybe this time next year, I feel like this is this bot activity discourse has really hit maybe in 2025. We're all a little bit more aware of it now. We're building out, you know, a repertoire of research on it.

You know, hopefully if we were to be. coming back together in December 2026, maybe we'll have like a better understanding of this that will get us less locked into these outrage cycles. Molly, is there anything else that I have not asked you about that you want to make sure gets included in this conversation? I guess like, is there a part of the internet that makes you happy? Like, why are we all, why are we all still here on the internet? Like, why are we doing this? What are you, what's your internet happy place? What makes, what fills you with hope for the future and or just, you just, you just, like spending time online. Yeah, well, I mean, I guess I mentioned that I was like a 2010's Tumblr

girly and I still have close friends that I met on Tumblr that I am talking to, you know, 15 years later. So I think that that's like the power of internet subcommunities when they're working well. And I think that people use the internet to find connections like that. I'm so used to talking about the fucking drugs of the internet that I forget that actually it's a place that I like and I'm there every day voluntarily and like it was hugely informative to me as a youth and you know that's why I keep coming back. It's a good reminder to be like you actually enjoy technology, right? Like you actually like voluntarily keep it in your life. No? Yeah.

You're not like a complete letting at this point, right? Exactly. More after a quick break. Another podcast from some SNL. late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman

help make you funnier. This week, my guest, S&L's Mikey Day and head writer, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. The worst singer in the group. The worst? Yeah.

Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The yard birds, right? That's the name. The Harvard Yard, but they're open.

Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle-aged. One erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Humor me. I need some jokes to make me seem funny. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting.

Think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ad-supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHeart's twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business. Think IHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Call 844-I-Hart to get started. That's 844-8-4-4-I-Hart. Last night, a blown call changed a game. This morning, the internet lost its mind. Highlights are trending, opinions are flying, and nobody's telling you exactly what happened. That's where Sports Slice comes in. I'm Timbo. Every episode, we're cutting through the noise, breaking down the plays, the controversies, and the stories behind the headlines. We go straight to the source, the athlete themselves. Their locker room stories, their reactions, the stuff nobody gets to hear. The laughs, the drama, the triumphs, the moments that never make the highlight real. From viral moments to historical,

games from buzzer beaters to controversial calls, we break it down, give you context, and ask the questions everybody wants answered. SportsSlice brings you closer to the action with stories told by the people who live them. Listen to SportsSlice on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more, follow Timbo Slicelife Life 12 in the TikTok podcast network on TikTok. Life throws hurdles big and small. The question is, how do you conquer them? On Hurtle with Emily Abadi, we sit down with the most inspiring women in sports and wellness, professional athletes, coaches, and Olympic champions to talk about the challenges that shaped them and the mindset that keeps them going. From the WMBA standout Kate Martin and

rising hockey star Layla Edwards. If a boy can do it, I don't see why a girl can't. Like, I've never understood that. Like, it didn't make sense in my brain. It's hard to be in spaces that no one looks like you, but don't ever feel like you don't belong. Don't let that be the reason you don't do it. An Olympic champs Gabby Thomas and Katie Ladeke. The ability to show a gold medal to someone and have their face light up and smile, that means the world to me. And that's what motivates me to win more gold medals. At our level, at this scale,

like being able to fail in front of the entire world. Like, I can do anything. I can do anything. Because resilience isn't just about winning. It's about showing up, even when it's hard. Listen to Hurtle with Emily Abadi on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart women's sports. Imagine an Olympics where doping is not only legal but encouraged. It's the enhanced games. Some call it grotesque. Others say it's unleashing human potential. Either way, the podcast's Superhuman documented it all, embedded in the games and with the athletes for a full year. Within probably 10 days, I'd put on 10 pounds. I was having trouble stopping the muscle growth. Listen to Superhuman on the I-Hard radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's get right back into it.

Social media platforms only work when they actually help people make sense of the world around them. That breaks down when they're overrun with inauthentic narratives and bots engineered to bait engagement. But understanding all this is where the work of people like Keith Presley comes in. We started as a nonprofit trying to identify how information moves across the internet. So where are those breeding grounds of information campaigns and then how does it get to the broader network and impact people, just mapping how information moved. So we went ahead and did that. Turns out there's a lot more use cases than the limited one we had in the nonprofit, so we then spun out into a company. Keith's company, Gidea, was all over the internet thanks to a report they put out,

looking at how coordinated bot campaigns influenced discourse around the release of Taylor Swift's latest album, Life of a Showgirl. You might recall that after the album was released, Taylor put out a necklace featuring lightning bolts, an image that some felt bore a striking resemblance to Nazi SS iconography. The report examined what sparked those claims and how those claims spread across the internet like wildfire. The report was published in Rolling Stone magazine. We like to consider ourselves a storm tracker for the internet. So as a meteorologist uses patterns to predict the weather, we use patterns to predict information online. So we take in information from over 480 different platforms.

And then we have a patented process where we run graphnal networking through that data to see how people behave with it and then use AI to lift out those behavioral patterns and summarize for our clients. I have seen people say that what your company does is essentially PR, that celebrities and brands like Taylor Swift

just give you all money to print nice things about them. What do you say to somebody who feels that way about what you're doing? I would say one, this report we did on our own. We were just interested. I had a gut feeling that there was something funny going on, ran the report, and then, you know, found something. A big reason of why we wanted to do this, though, and released it is a lot of this work is behind closed doors, right? We do work with companies and report on what is happening around their narratives. The public doesn't get to

see that. And so this was a way for us to get something out there so that people could have a better understanding of how online information environments are actually being manipulated. It's true that most of the social listening work happening in 2025 stays behind closed doors. And even though the headline in Rolling Stone made it seem like something extraordinary had happened with the Taylor Swift narrative, to analysts who work on this kind of stuff all the time, this kind of influence campaign was basically just another Tuesday. It's funny that you say that this report started with just sort of a gut feeling. months ago, back in October,

we did an episode about the conversation links to the launch of Taylor Swift's latest album. And I said the exact same thing. I said, I don't have any proof. I'm not a data scientist. My producer is a data analyst, but that is not a skill set that I have,

but I have been on the internet for a very long time. And I'm particularly pretty plugged in with how conversation about marginalized people. So like women, especially, women in the public eye, pretty clued into how those conversations move. And the way that I would describe the

conversation specifically around the Taylor Swift Nazi necklace thing, it was like it came on strong out of nowhere, was such an intense conversation, and then it kind of stopped just as abruptly as it started. I just something about that. I said, I don't know if this is all authentic. Something about the way that it came on so suddenly, this gave me pause, I guess I will say. It sounds like you all were in the same boat. Exactly. There are some tall-tale signs of things are fishy, right? And this is, when you see such huge surges out of nowhere, that it is normally a leading indicator that there are some sort of coordinated activity to get that information out there to then impact how a normal person is going to talk about it.

get them to interact with that negative or illicit content, right? It's the goal. They're rage baiting. So is that really kind of how this report came to be? Just this inkling of something fishy is going on here. Let's find out what it is. Yeah, truly. I know in the article, Georgia Paul says, you know, she just had a feeling.

It really came from that. It was we were like in one of our early morning meetings and we were like, hey, let's do it. Let's investigate it and see what's going on there. So what did the report find? So essentially that the Nazi, that Taylor Swift is a Nazi and that the necklace with the lightning bolt necklace, and that was alluding to the SS from Germany. And what they were doing is so they laid down that content, a large quantity of that content, to then impact influencers who would then pick that up and then spread it more broadly to normal individuals.

At that point, the narrative transforms to actually then be in a comparison of Taylor to Kanye, having something like that happen is the end goal, right? Because that was actually real people now having that conversation, not driven by this inauthentic activity. Yeah, thank you for the summary there. I'm kind of jealous of the position that you guys are in, like having this data. Because like Bridget was saying, we had a similar, like, feeling and conversation that something felt off about this conversation.

But that's where it ended with us, right? Because we did not have the tools readily available to look into it. And one of the things that has come up for me, as we were researching this episode and talking to people, is just how valuable

it is for the public to get glimpses like this, using data to actually bring some data to help us understand what can seem very random, but but often is not in terms of like conversation happening on the internet. It's almost kind of like a black box, the internet, right?

Especially the social media platforms where you, there's millions of posts, billions of posts being made daily, lots of different coordinated activities to either, you know, from crypto schemes to just influencers wanting to get clicks. There's a lot of competing priorities that just you can't see normally. You can't get that. picture, especially as a normal person, right? We can only really see what our feeds are.

Yeah, and I always make this point on the show. There are so few spaces or industries where the public is coming into contact with it regularly where you have such limited information or data about how it's impacting people, right? If there was a car company that was killing people and we weren't able to get that information, if there was a pharmaceutical company, There are really a lot of companies or industries where we've just accepted, this is a black box of information where the public is interacting with this every day but has no idea what that interaction actually means or looks like. On our end, this industry is really new, too, just trying to actually understand how the internet works or information moving on the internet or how it's

impacting people. There's some academic research that's been happening recently, you know, and then companies like ours that are trying to figure this out to help. society, but it's still a pretty small pool of people trying to do this. I'd like to get into the methodology of your report just a little bit. Like one of the things that you did was classify accounts according to whether they were typical or atypical and then further subdivided the atypical. And that seems like an interesting approach to this problem of trying to make sense out of all these different actors and like different types of actors where, you know, the binary

of ordinary human versus bot. As we've been researching this, I'm starting to feel like that's not perhaps a super useful distinction, a binary distinction. And so you guys used, I think, five different categories. Could you talk a little bit about that decision

and how you defined those? Yeah. And you're kind of hitting the nail on the head for how we were thinking about this. That one or zero, if you're looking at the, what is trying to, what are people trying to,

trying to do online as either bot or not bot, typical or atypical, you're kind of missing the point. All of these actions are coordinated to make information go viral, right? That's the end goal. They want to get in front of eyeballs because for either illicit reasons or making money, etc. To do that, you can't just, here's a bot, right? It's going to post a lot. That's not going to get something to go viral, as we've seen, right? You've got to impact people.

And so we've observed and modeled five different behavioral patterns from the typical user all the way down to what you would consider that three, you know, the bot. And I are working to understand how they're used online to actually get information to go viral. So, you know, an influencer has their own specific behavioral pattern that they're going to be using, what we call outliers, facilitators, and then power players. And so all of them work together in some instance to push strategies and tactics to make that information get in front of people.

How do you know when this behavior is coordinated? That was one of the points, the takeaways in the report was these are not just inauthentic accounts acting on their own. They're all coordinated in a kind of way as a network. How did you determine that? Yeah. So that's part of our patented process where so that graph neural networking through the information reveals patterns of behavior. And so it really does.

It's like a fingerprint within the data. It actually has a very distinct pattern that we can then see and lift out and then make those determinations. And so a lot of that can be, you know, how are they interacting with like accounts? How are they interacting with peers? The language that they are using, the timing. there is a slew of clues that we have identified that we then use to make these determinations. One of the criticisms that I've seen of the study is that the data set, the data that you used for this was not made available, right? And so if I wanted to take that data set and crunch the numbers myself, I could not do this.

We had a conversation with somebody from a social listening organization, and they said, oh, well, that's actually kind of commonplace for, private companies, they might have proprietary things. They don't want out there. How much did that impact not making that data set available for the public? Twofold. So proprietary processes and then like data licenses that we're not actually can make some data available, right? Because we do have API access to various platforms.

So you just can't give away their information. Okay. this is such a good point because, and this is a frustration of mine, it used to be that if you wanted API access to X, right? That was not something that would be difficult to get. In 2025, things have really changed. And so, yeah, I don't know if people who are not sort of in this world really know the ways that a lot of the internet and how it works is, has been turned into a black box. And so it's incredibly difficult to get that kind of access for most of us these days. And we simply, you know, just don't have it. And just to underscore that, you know, it's, it's not a black box because it is so mysterious, no one could know it. It is a black box because the people who run the platforms

have decided that they want the box to be black. Yeah. You know, monetizing the information that they have. And I think it's become probably even worse now, you know, with training LLMs, you know, a good place to get information is from these social media platforms, which then, you know, they're not getting any value off of that, those companies training off of their data.

So I think it's kind of become a positive feedback loop. I was also really interested in the sort of temporal analysis that you guys did, looking at not just the mix of the types of accounts, but how it changed over time pretty rapidly in the immediate days after, you know, the beginning of the study period, which I think was like the day after the album drop. Can you talk a little bit about what the, that temporal analysis and how the, the shifting mix of actors, what that tells us that wouldn't be available if you just looked at a single snapshot in time? It's actually important to look at these as snapshot in time. So we can go

down from like the micro second all the way up to, you know, centuries. We don't have that much data yet though. But the key here is so let's say the Taylor Swift report. It's actually about 3.7% of the total users were these inauthentic type users that contributed 28% of the total content. That's the big snapshot, but that doesn't tell you the whole picture when you then look at it how it happened over the course of hours, where that 3.7% at the first instance of this narrative spiking contributed, it was about 15 to 20% of the total audience and contributed, I think it was 78% of the total volume of, right? So if you only look at one, overall snapshot, you are going to, you're not going to see the forest from the trees.

I'm sure you know that the reaction to this. Quite aware. Yeah, it's been big. I'm sure y'all have had a wild week. And it's been really interesting. And I think kind of weirdly telling to engage with some of the criticisms that people have made or like just responses that people have had. They've been like deeply emotional responses, I guess is how I'll put them. And one of the things I've seen, I, I, I've seen the takeaways from the report. I don't want to say misrepresented, but I would summarize it as one camp being like,

see, 100% of the people who pushed this narrative were bots. And this was a narrative that did not exist for real. If you thought this was real, you got taken. And then I saw people like black women on social media being like, I'm not a bot, I'm a real person. I felt XYZ about Taylor Swift. And what's interesting to me is that when you actually read the report, neither the report does not make either of those claims and so i guess i wonder you know what what do you

think accounts for the fact that people are using the report to say something that i think the report patently did not suggest yeah um we've definitely noticed and had discussions about that too we're like where are you guys getting this from um our whole goal so we're not the arbiters of truth right that is not what we do as a company um what we're trying to to do is tell you who and what and why is that narrative happening. That's what we're trying to do. It's like how did that come to be? And so yeah, you know, in this instance, even though there's a high percentage of non-typical actors, there were still normal people that did engage with it. So we're not discounting that there was some genuine engagement at the start. It's just that

that first layer came from non-typical users, right? And then people were, got brought into it and then it morphed and as it grew over the course of the couple days. And I feel like that is part and parcel of these online manipulation campaigns where the point is to get real authentic people talking about stuff that otherwise they probably wouldn't be talking about. And so this is not inauthentic discourse from bots. I have personally gotten myself pulled into conversations where I'm like, why am I all caps rage tweeting about Cracker Barrel right now, a restaurant I have not eaten at him 20 years. Like the ways that they can get you to pull in and engage, like that's the point. That is. Yeah, nail on the head. That literally is the

point. They want you to get engaged with that content. The report makes it clear that there was overlap between some of this Taylor Swift inauthentic behavior and Blake lively. What's going on there? Like, what are the implications for that? Yeah, I would say highly suspicious. Very sus. Yeah. You know, especially that far apart, right? And the same classification, like the facilitator accounts, those are the ones that typically posted high volumes and short stents.

The fact that there were so many overlapping that far apart tells me that that was more of a coordinated activity. I mean, that kind of takes me back to a stepping back question. why would someone be invested in manipulating the conversation around Taylor Swift on the internet? Like who and why? So we've also talked about that internally and trying to, you know, so we work with brands and we see this all the time where, you know, either corporate espionage or, you know, targeted campaigns to hurt market relevance. On the Taylor Swift side in Blake Clively, I guess we have two theories. One, testing, right?

So Taylor Swift is a huge brand. She drives economies. You can almost say that she's a political figure. If you can impact how Swifties or that conversation online around her, that means those strategies and tactics would then work for others. And then the other one is around the economic. again, she drives economy. So if you can hurt her reputation,

that allows others to fill that void. Was that meant to be a bit of a Taylor Swift pun? Doesn't she have an album called Reputation? I think. Don't quote me on that. More after a quick break. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guide, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends.

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How did the report end up in being covered in Rolling Stone? We went out and we shopped it around, and Rolling Stones was interested in writing about it. Like, again, we were also equally giddy about that one. We did not anticipate such reaction. I'm going to be honest. Yeah, I mean, the reaction has been absolutely wild.

And I understand that, like, companies like yours, part of publishing studies like this, like especially, like, flashy ones, ones that people are going to actually, you know, want to be reading, part of it is, like, getting publicity for the work that they are able to do. And so, like, to that end, do you consider this to be a success? Like, I don't know the last time that a report, I mean, we look internally, we're reading reports about the internet all the time. Typically, my cousin is not texting me about them.

You know what I'm saying? Yeah. So, yes, definitely would consider it a success. To that point, I've had family that I haven't spoken to in years and been like, oh, my God, I'm speaking to. Yeah, it was crazy, but, you know, it was, I guess, to the point, we were just trying to demonstrate the ability that we have, right? That was really what we wanted to show people, what is happening online and how we can help.

I mean, one possible takeaway here is that, like, there is a lot of appetite among the public and demand for this kind of information. Yeah, that's, I was kind of, we kind of were thinking that too, and then what else could we look into that could be helpful for people. Can you give us a sense of when somebody gets on the internet, how much conversation online is perhaps being impacted by inauthentic behavior?

Because, you know, from Cracker Barrel, the Blake lively to Taylor Swift, it seems like these conversations that you might have thought of as innocuous are now actually being manipulated by inauthentic actors. Yeah. So my whole quote, the internet is fake, it kind of really is.

So since we've been doing this, we have yet to find a narrative that didn't have bot activity or inauthentic activity. Like, not a single one. I mean, it's sort of, I mean, I guess when I read that quote, the internet is fake, I didn't realize you meant to quite so literally.

Yeah, quite, yeah. It's just kind of scary. Like, we, you know, we were a little bright-eyed and bushy-tailed when we got into this, and over the course of, you know, doing this work, we've seen just how much inauthentic activity there really is happening online. How are we meant to use our social media platforms and platforms for discourse? How are we meant to use them effectively, if that's the case? Like, can they be used effectively anymore?

That's a really hard question, too. And so if I could wave a magic wand, like how I would think, fix this. So humans have had thousands of years to figure out the etiquette of behaving with each other in real life, right? There's so many different norms that we have that have just come from those centuries. The internet, like in the current state that we use it, maybe 20 years, 25, right? My gut is that we probably need to figure out what the etiquette is when interacting with

people online because, you know, right now there is none. just the Wild West. Yeah, the Wild West is a good way to describe it. And especially for these conversations that, frankly, I think even 15 years ago did not feel this heated online. It's incredibly difficult to have a conversation. Even a conversation is about something as simple and innocuous, has an album, a movie, something like that, without it feeling vitriolic.

And I have to imagine this inauthentic activity is adding to that. Oh, yeah, absolutely. that type of content gets the most clicks, so it gets lifted up the fastest. It's actually been really interesting and meta for us to watch us become the conspiracy. That one's going to be a fun white paper we're going to do on ourselves now.

Oh, my gosh. You absolutely should. We'll have you back. And that's the thing. When I was preparing for this, I was going through social media and I was trying to pull out some of the, I guess criticisms maybe isn't the right word,

but some of the things people have been saying about the report, about your company. Some of them, from my own background, I know to be incorrect, right? Like saying, oh, this is just PR. Taylor said probably paid to have them print this. And I'm like, well, it's not really what these companies do. And I guess, how could I even ask this? Let's say, like I understand why and how a lot of people who are saying, hey, I'm not a bot. I feel offended and unseen and erased by a report that makes me. you feel like my voice isn't a real voice, right? That's not what the report said, but I get

how that's the conclusions that they're coming to. My thing is this, if you are someone who really can't stand Taylor Swift, you think that Taylor Swift is a literal Nazi, let's say that for the sake of argument, I would think that you would want reports like this to make clear how difficult it is for your message to break through online, how much that message, even if that's a message that you authentically feel, how easily exploited it is and the fact that it is being disrupted. And so I would imagine even people who want to use internet platforms to authentically engage in like critical discourse, they more than anybody should want to have a media landscape where that is possible without this kind of inauthentic interference and manipulation.

No, I completely agree. Not only that, but those individuals that do have those true feelings, and want to use it as a platform to voice those feelings, often get taken advantage of by the inauthentic activity accounts. So a very, very common thing is they're not creating the narrative that they want to push. They're pulling it from these small populations that they're like, oh, that one, that will really make people mad. And then they push it inauthentically. So essentially, they're actually getting taken advantage of by these accounts.

I've actually seen this, or at least suspected that I've been a target of this kind of thing, because you could just be being a garden variety hater on the internet. You know, like, oh, I didn't like this. I didn't like that. Then you've got a comment from someone who's like, yeah, let's boycott it or like, yeah, let's, like they take it to a level where you're like, well, I was just trying to engage in a little low-level snark. I didn't mean it like this. But if you're already sort of riled up and you're not necessarily thinking super critically about it, is this difficult to not engage, I guess? is what I'm saying. No, exactly. And again, that's the point. It's really hard not to engage with this when either you really do believe in it or you're really, really opposed to it. You want to say

something. That's just human nature. Do you see any solutions to this? Is there something that, I mean, I don't, it's like, what? Like, is there something that platforms could be doing that they're not or, you know, shouldn't be doing that they're currently doing? Yeah. And that's a really tough question that I don't know if we're even equipped to say, like, what the solution would be here. There are certain things that are really clear indicators that somebody is doing something nefarious. Like, people that are really trying to push illicit content will change their handle a lot over the course of just a short time span. Right. How many times did you change your handle? Like never, rarely.

People, right, that's, and these accounts are doing it, you know, three times a day. like, you know, there are, there's key indicators that they could be looking for that would allow them to mitigate some of this inauthentic activity. My favorite thing is when I see an account that says it has a, the images of like a white person. And then the post will be like, well, as a black woman, and I'm like, oh, did someone switch up their grift? But what happened? Those are our favorite, too. We pass those around where it's like, wow, you're, you're, you're. The LLM model here really fails you.

Yes. Yeah. So it's tough. I mean, it sounds like there's a lot platforms could be doing, but obviously I don't have a direct line to Elon Musk or anything. But what about individuals? Like, while we are in the absence of platforms really doing what they can to crack down on this kind of thing, do you have advice for people, especially as we navigate what feel like

increasingly volatile times where conversations? where conversation just reflecting the times, like it just seems more volatile. Do you have advice for folks as they weighed through that to not be impacted or manipulated by this kind of an authentic behavior? Yeah. First, like, take a breath, right? Don't respond immediately. But then I think it's because people are still going to want to respond.

So how do you do that, right? How do you engage with this content without actually engaging? engaging the algorithm that then is going to boost it to even more eyes. So our goal is to try to help people understand how to navigate these narratives. And so in this instance, it's kind of like a three-step process. So observe but don't interact. So you can see the content, but don't like it, don't share it, don't do anything that would boost the algorithm. Then if you want to count her, you post separately, but don't reply in the comments.

right? So you can make your own post about it, but don't be replying to it in the comments, because again, that's going to boost it algorithmically, and then try to redirect to a more positive narrative. So in your post, talk about, you know, don't engage what they're talking about directly, try to redirect it into a more positive sense without using any of the same hashtags or the like of that original negative content. That way you can be trying to change the conversation instead of boosting something algorithmically. What is next for you all? Can you give us a little preview about what the next big,

an authentic conversation online might be? Sadly, no, right? Because you never know what's going to happen online. I mean, we definitely are going to do one on ourselves because, man, did that go crazy? But I don't know. Like if we wanted to do another one, maybe K-pop could be a fun one. Oh, we were just having a conversation with one of our producers, Joey, about just K-pop fandom in general.

I had no idea. I had no idea. Oh, we have, we've worked with clients where, like, they're just their online activity have broken our systems. So the K-pop community is real and large. And it just goes to show exactly what you were talking about, that these might sound like, quote, celebrity stories. but, you know, K-pop, it's such a big fandom that it says so much about how, not just celebrity and fandom and how we live, but like how we live our lives, politically, class issues, gender issues.

These are real things that really motivate people in our world. And so it's not just celebrities and fluff. It's conversations that have actual influence. When we see big fandoms getting involved with something, normally it's actually in a positive sense really lifting up a new album or saying how much they like something actually the the fandoms

really do tend to be like a wholesome community like they share nice content as someone who studies the internet and this spends a lot of time making reports about what's happening there are you does it give you hope like this like the conversation about fandoms

and them making wholesome content. You had a little smile when you mentioned that talking about technology and the internet that like, these are things that we like, spaces that we like. I find myself hating on them and lifting the bad stuff, but do you feel hopeful and good about the internet, given all this? No, I think there's still so much to be gained from ever increasing connections, right? Because all of these social media platforms really were about connecting individuals together that had like interests. And I think there, when it became like social media, and it's now about media content, that has driven a little bit more of the negativity.

But, you know, it really at its core, it is about people engaging with communities that have like interests. And I think that's great. Our whole goal is to help people have a better understanding of the world they live in, and especially that information environment where it's just really hard to know what's real or not. Got a story about an interesting thing in tech or just want to say hi? You can reach us at hello at tangoody.com. You can also find transcripts for today's episode at tangoody. There are no girls on the internet was created by me, Bridget Todd.

It's a production of IHeart Radio and Unbossed Creative. Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer. Tarry Harrison is our producer and sound engineer. Michael Amato is our contributing producer. I'm your host, Bridget Todd. If you want to help us grow, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, check out the IHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

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We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the I-Heart Radio app. Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Life is full of hurdles. So how do you keep going? On Hurtle with Emily Abadi, we're talking with the most inspiring women in sports and wellness from professional athletes, coaches, and Olympic champions about the challenges that shape them

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This morning, the internet lost its mind, and nobody's telling you exactly what happened. That's where Sports Slice comes in. I'm Timbo, and every episode, we're cutting through the noise, breaking down the biggest moments in sports and giving you the real story behind the headline. And we're going straight to the source, the athletes themselves, their locker room stories, their reactions in the moment,

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And with the World Cup right around the corner, we'll be. be breaking down the biggest storylines ahead of the big tournament here in the USA. Listen to the 1021 podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, everyone. I'm Cheryl Stray, author of Wild and Tiny Beautiful Things. I'm excited to share that I have a new podcast called Mind Over Mountain. In each episode, I interview athletes, adventurers, and adrenaline seekers to discuss the

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