There Are No Girls on the Internet - Was the Taylor Swift ‘Nazi’ Controversy A Coordinated Bot Attack? EMERGENCY EPISODE!

Episode Date: December 13, 2025

Did you see the narrative claiming Taylor Swift is a secret “trad wife Nazi” take off across social media? In this emergency episode, we break down a new report from analytics firm Gudea that examines how this discourse spread online, the role bot networks may have played, and what it reveals about misinformation, amplification, and the current internet ecosystem. Stay tuned because we’ll hear from Gudea’s CEO and another third party expert about how this report came to be and what it means for how information travels online. Taylor Swift’s Last Album Sparked Bizarre Accusations of Nazism. It Was a Coordinated Attack: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/taylor-swifts-social-media-campaign-life-of-a-showgirl-1235480646/ Here’s the full report: https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/69370c45ee6946ee05e9618a/6938f591279bf559ec50cd1c_GUDEA%20-%20Taylor%20Swift%20_%20Anatomy%20of%20a%20Narrative.pdfSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Listen to Mind Over Mountain every Thursday on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. There are No Girls on the Internet is a production of IHeart Radio and Unbossed Creative. I'm Bridget Todd, and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet. So this is kind of an emergency episode. So I have to bring in the production dream team for the first time ever on the podcast. We have both Joey, our resident Swifty. Yes.

Hello, Bridget. Of course. I'm so glad you're here. And producer Mike, our resident data analyst, data scientists. What is your preferred? How do you identify? Social scientist. Identify as a social scientist.

A psychologist, if pressed. But I'm like pretty cross-disciplinary. But data analyst is certainly correct. I have analyzed a lot of data and I continue to. And yeah, thanks for having me here. Joey, it's so nice to be on an episode with you. It is. Listers might not realize, yeah, this is our first episode on air together.

And in fact, this first time we've ever heard each other's voices in real time. Yeah, I was saying people keep asking for behind the scenes what's going on. Mike and I have never actually had a conversation face-to-face. We will only communicate with each other over email and over hearing each other on the podcast. So this is a really big moment for the Tangodi universe. Yeah, tangoity first. Worlds are colliding. Back when Taylor Swift released her latest album,

we did a few episodes talking about some of the online controversy. and conversations that that album sparked. Namely, the idea that she was sort of pushing trad wife sensibilities, this was her sort of big trad wife pivot. And then later, the idea that one of the pieces of merch from her launch, this necklace with lightning bolts and a star on it, was actually full of coated Nazi dog whistles

and references. And I remember regretting deeply that Joey, that you were not on that episode, because as a Swifty, I'm certain that you probably probably were plugged into that conversation. What were your thoughts? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. You know, I think, I got to say,

Joe did a great job of representing the Swifty community in that episode, the shows of the podcast, the really holding it together here. But yeah, no, I think, I agree. We've talked about, Bridget, we've talked about this off-bite a bazillion times listeners. I did at one point send Bridget, a bunch of Taylor Swift songs that she should listen to.

I don't know if she ever actually listened. of them, but I tried. But I'll be like, I guess I'll just run through my Swifty credentials real quick to let y'all know where I'm coming from. I have been hesitant to call myself a Swifty in the past. I'll come and go embracing it. I'll explain why.

But I would, yeah, I'm a pretty big Taylor Swiftian. I would call myself a Swifty. I, like, I'm right at the age where, like, I grew up listening to her. Like, Fearless was the first album that I ever owned. I've gone to three of her tours, one of which was. the Aeros Tour. I was at the Chicago tour where she played the lakes. Of course, fitting, so I was right by like Michigan.

And of course, Bridget, as you know, my other favorite thing to talk about is, like, fandom culture and how fandom culture and, like, politics have sort of become intertwined in the past, like, 10 years. Both of, like, the fandomification of politics and this, like, politicization of fandom in a lot of ways. I, basically, I've been in online fandom spaces.

my whole life. I never was a big, like, I'm going to follow this musician. Like, I really into, like, following the music. I never is into, like, following their personal life. So I was a little bit on the outside for that. I think I definitely know people that are more, like, into, like, Taylor and what she's doing or whatever. I never was, like, that level of stuffy.

Again, no disrespect to that. I, like, we all have our, like, things that we're obsessed with. And I'm going to get into later, I think, like, there is sort of an unfair kind of ridicule. of Swifties when I think it comes to the fact that anybody you meet basically has like some sort of fandom thing that they're really, really into. Going back to the actual question. When this album came out, I will be real. I didn't love it. I think like, this is the first time I think she's released to album and like a lot of my friends that are Swifty. My sister's a huge, huge Swifty. And she

immediately was like, yeah, it's not good. So I think that was interesting. I didn't really love torture to pose society either. Like, I think there were a couple songs on Midnights I like, but other than, like, I, folklore evermore, I was a bit, 1989, fearless, not fearless, 1989 reputation, like,

those are my favorite albums. So, yeah, I think when, when this album dropped, on the one hand, I was sort of like, you know what, I didn't really like it. It's not for me, I'm going to move on. I know this is going to turn into a huge internet debate. And lo and behold, it did.

as I think we're going to get into. Yeah, I mean, you really summarized it well. And this is what I said in the episodes that we did about Taylor Swift after the album had just come out. I think that there is something that happens with Taylor Swift where she hit so many different intersection points. Gender, politics, the ethics of being a billionaire, class, race, all of these things that we know are these tensions in our society. she sits at the intersection point of all of them. And so in one of those episodes, I said that I was becoming concerned

that I thought the conversation was being, I don't think I used the word manipulated. I think I said it was it felt right for manipulation. I didn't have any proof. It was just my sense. And part of that was because, you know, when a conversation, you can just tell when a conversation feels volatile,

it feels emotional, it feels difficult to participate in in kind of more casual ways. Those are the conversations, whether it's Taylor Swift or something else, where I just think, ooh, this could be easily manipulated because there's so many emotions involved

in the conversation. Yeah, no, totally agreed. I think, Bridget, I have the same feeling as you where I think, again, I listen to this album. I sort of was like, this isn't for me. I'm going to go back to listening to folklore. but it was like, I know there's going to be discourse, and immediately it was like, oh, this is going in a bazillion different directions.

I think there is a level of like, hey, there is a conversation we had here. I think a lot of the points we're going to get into, there is something to be talked about. But yeah, it is like, I agree. Whenever Taylor Swift comes up, like, she is just such a popular figure and that unfortunately, like a lot of our kind of cultural ideas about women get projected onto her just by being like the most famous. famous woman. But yeah, no, 100% agree. It's very easy to make Taylor Swift kind of the stand-in for

like white ladies, you know, like, like there's something about her that I think is just, it's very easy to project a lot of stuff onto her. And so, you know, when I was watching the discourse get quite heated about Taylor Swift and this, the Nazi necklace stuff, I felt this way then, and I feel it even more strongly today that I want to be very clear that even though I had a sense that some of the conversation might have been being manipulated in some way, whether by bots and authentic accounts, much of it was real people making genuine critiques and Taylor Swift. Like we got in the episode that we did about the lightning bolt necklace, we got listeners weighing in in the Spotify comments. Thank you for that. And it's not like those were bots, right? Those were people that I can visually see.

like, I know this listener. This is a listener of the show. They are real people engaged in real genuine discourse because they think it is important. And so I want to make that super clear. And I feel more than ever, that has been, that reality has been confirmed. And so the reason why we're talking about this, again, is because this week, a company called Gudea put out a report about the conversation being driven about Taylor Swift online. What did this report find? Well, here's their executive summary. Between October 4th and October 18th of 2025, the public conversation surrounding Taylor Swift and her album, The Life of a Showgirl, evolved into a highly complex narrative ecosystem. Gudea analyzed 24,679 posts from 18,213 users across 14 platforms,

identifying a polarized online environment shaped by a mixture of organic cultural discourse, symbolic reinterpretation and targeted inauthentic activity. A key finding of this analysis is the role that what they're calling inauthentic narratives played in triggering authentic engagement. The false narrative that Taylor Swift was using Nazi symbolism did not remain to fringe conspiratorial spaces. It successfully pulled typical users into comparisons between Taylor Swift and Kanye West, who we know is basically like a Nazi now is like designing clothing lines with swastikas

on them and releasing songs that are odes to Hitler, right? So the report finds. This demonstrates how a strategically seated falsehood can convert into widespread authentic discourse, reshaping public perception even when most users do not believe the originating claim. Additionally, Dudaia found a significant overlap between accounts pushing the swift Nazi narrative and those active in a separate AstroTurf campaign attacking Blake lively. This overlap reveals a cross-event amplification network, one that disproportionately influences multiple celebrity-driven controversies and injects misinformation into otherwise organic conversation. Not surprised to hear that there's the overlap with the Blake lively situation, too.

Something that's also kind of is drawing up is, like, I know we've done a story on Tangodi before about the whole like Lena Dunham thing where there was like a misinterpretation about her having sexually assaulted her sister. Not true. Yes. Very much. But it was taken from like a grain of fact and then turned into something else. I feel like a lot of times the Taylor Swift sort of discourse is similar where it's like,

there's things you can criticize. I'm like, and we're getting into that. There's plenty of things you can criticize about her and about her music and about the way that she presents herself to the world. That doesn't necessarily mean like strad wife Nazi, you know? Like it's like from step one to step like, I don't know, 10,000. And something this did also make me think about was, so this album came out, I want to say, it was October this year, right?

It was earlier this year. I can't point to when this started, but something that I've noticed, like, within the last couple months, primarily looking at, I don't really use Twitter anymore. Twitter is just a nightmare of misinformation. Instagram Reels for me has gotten, like, I don't really, I don't know, I will just, if I'm using Reels, I'm just like, mindless scrolling. I've been getting so much, like, rage bait content that is very, like, specific to topics that I'm interested in, which has been really interesting. Something I keep going back to is, I keep getting these videos that are, like, specifically about trans people that feel very, like, yeah, like, they're trying to create, like, ragebait content.

And I'm like, I can't tell if this is legit, if this is somebody just trying to get interactions with their post or if, like, this is somebody's actual beliefs that they're putting out there. Anyways, that's to say, I feel like I've seen an increase of this type of content that's specifically banking on the fact that that's how you get views. That's how you tap into a current hot topic issue. You say something really crazy against what you use. You get money from that. I don't know if like the fact that I'm seeing such an increase that lately also is sort of tied to this. Well, you bring up a good point that there's, you know, this report focuses on accounts that are creating content, you know, authentic human account. and then inauthentic accounts that maybe their bots, maybe not.

But what's left out of this report entirely, and often the whole discourse is the role of the platforms themselves, specifically like meta, who is really good at targeting to our very individual interests. And so even this report that finds that there was a lot of coordinated inauthentic activity, that wouldn't be successful if the platforms didn't. allow it to be so. And so I think that's an important thing

to keep in mind, as well as the fact that, like, you know, the Blake lively connection here, I think, does a, is a really important part of this analysis because it makes it more general

and it's not just a conversation about Taylor Swift, which gets connected to so many other conversations, but it really is about, like, who is controlling these bots, or these accounts, rather, not bots, maybe bots, but like these accounts that are

not behaving like typical humans and just really aggressively and extremely often retweeting this rage baity content across different celebrities. I think that's a nice feature of this study. Yeah, I completely

agree. And I, this is a little bit of a tangent, but I think I've talked about this on the podcast before. And it doesn't make me feel good to say it, but I kind of got taken by what we now know was largely an inauthentic campaign around Amber Heard. Basically, at the time, I was like a low information person when it came to the whole Amber Hurd Johnny Depp thing. And I would be scrolling TikTok or scrolling Instagram or whatever,

and I would be surfaced this content that was all rage bait, all lies, all super-inflammatory, all really to make Amber Heard look bad. And it was content that led me to believe, oh, the popular sentiment is that everybody, it's just understood that Amber Heard is a horrible person and lie. It's on me that I did not do more investigation and that I was just like, oh, I guess that's the, I guess that must be the truth.

And it wasn't until actually looking into it that I was like, wait a minute. I am being manipulated about a topic that at the time I had not been bothered to kind of look deeply in. And I really realized, even as somebody who thinks of myself as pretty savvy, talks about the internet for a living, we are all very susceptible. Like, I was very susceptible. Now, luckily, I didn't go on a tirade being like Amber Heard is a liar. I didn't, I didn't, it was just content I was seeing in my home that I was just like, oh, there it is. Okay, move on. But like, none of us are immune to this, I guess is what I'm saying. Agreed. I mean, I think I had sort of a similar thing with like the Blake Lyle

lively case, which I think a lot of people did. Like, there was a lot of, which again, going back to, sometimes it's people where there's, like, there's the grain of criticism we're starting with, and then it spirals into something else. But yeah, no, it is like, I still to this day will see, like, constant bashing Amber Hurd.

And I'm like, what's going on? I'm like, what's the point at this point? Like, come on. Yeah, I'm like, there's so many bigger, come on. Like, leave her alone. A whole deep dive expo. called who trolled Amber all like I feel like I think we have the receipts on what happened now like give it up it's big of both of you to you know own up to getting taken but I bridge to your point I think you know we're all being manipulated all the time like this is what I think one of the big takeaways from this report is that these accounts are out there they are pushing narratives some of them might be false and you know once we finally learn the truth or or whatever, we realized that, like, oh, we have been taken for a ride.

But a lot of them, like Joey said, aren't necessarily even false. Like, I'm thinking about the story that we covered earlier this week about the student in Oklahoma who got a zero on her paper and got big mad about it. Like, that was a true story. Was it important enough that, like, everyone in America should be talking about it? Probably not. And yet, here we are. That is a great point.

And I wanted to make this point from the report. really clear because it's a great segue. So the report reads, the data set reveals a multi-layered structure in which cultural commentary, political accusations, symbolic interpretation, and conspiratorial narratives intersect. While the majority of users behave typically, so we're not bots, just were regular people saying things that they actually believed on the internet, 3.77% exhibited non-typical behavior amplifiers and accounted for 28% of the conversation volume suggesting coordinated influence. This narrative environment unfolded across major platforms

including Twitter slash X, Reddit, Blue Sky, TikTok, and fringe ecosystems like Fortunes and Kiwi Farms, creating a cross-ecosystem narrative network capable of rapid escalation. So just to like underline that, I believe the main takeaway here is that while some of this was inauthentic or bot accounts amplifying inauthentic narratives,

that triggered real people to engage in real conversations and real discourse. So again, I'll probably say that's 100 more times throughout this episode because it's a misconception about this study that I'm really trying to squash out. The study is not saying everybody who engaged in this conversation is a bot that can be dismissed. What they're saying is a small percentage of this was bot or what they say as like atypical or non-typical behavior from these accounts, which could be bots. the majority of that the conversation was authentic conversation from real people. And so to Joey's point about fandoms, some of the way that real people engaged with this kind of content that might have been raised by inauthentic users were doing so to defend Taylor Swift, to criticize the irrationality of this like Nazi necklace conspiracy and to contextualize the incident through historical conflicts with Kanye West.

And so, yeah, I would call that like Swifty fan behavior of like I like Taylor Swift. I have seen what I believe to be an untrue conspiracy about her. I am going to engage with this conspiracy content to debunk it. And thus, I am actually sort of helping a probably inauthentically generated narrative to spread. Even though I myself am a real person, I'm not a bot. Yeah, definitely. I mean, again, it's easy to get talked. into, especially as somebody who is interested in pop culture,

is interested in these conversations. Like, it's easy to get baited into those conversations. I think, like, I don't know. Like, especially when this album came out, I had to kind of stop myself from, literally there was a point where I was just like, I'm just not going to engage in any of this because I was like, I know this is, like, pointless.

Like, I don't know what, like, at the end of the day, it's arguing over something that I, an album, I didn't even really like. Did you argue over it? I argued over it like with individuals in my life, but like I'll be real. Like there was, I had made a stupid joke about one of the songs and tortured poet society when that came out. And like, I got like a bunch of negative comments on that TikTok. And I was sort of like, I was just making fun of this one line.

Like it wasn't that big of a thing. I love Taylor Swift. I've said that. Like, but it went, yeah, no, it was like, I was just like, I don't. I don't know. Maybe this is a sign that I'm like, as a person that I was like, I actually need to put the phone down. But that being said, I don't know.

I, yeah, going back to what you're, there is something really interesting to me, again, having spent like my whole life in, like, online fandom spaces. I think there also is like a weird overlap. We've talked before on the show about, like, I was coming of age when, like, Tumblr was the big thing. A lot of my, like, early introduction to a lot of, like, political ideas was also from Tumblr. the same time I was looking at like Doctor Who edits

I think there's like these online spaces because so much of this happening online there is there ends up becoming this overlap with people's discussion of political issues of like sociopolitical issues whatever so I think there is an extent to which people like people almost sort of see

their fandom is like I need a fight for this social justice which is not always a great thing like I think I'm usually somebody who I'm in more like fictional media of fandom spaces a lot of times as people trying to be like, I have to prove that this piece of me, I got in an argument,

I did get in an actual argument with somebody recently who was like, basically, we were talking about like the character, the Punisher, who is like a classics example of a like, you already know where this is going. Yeah, it's a complicated character.

It's complicated character. That's why he's interesting, but they were like, no, he's this like leftist radical, like anti-racist. And I was like, no, he's not. Like, you don't. doesn't have to have the values that you have. Like, it's okay to, like, be a progressive person and enjoy this character who's, like, complicated. I don't know. Like, I think it's interesting when

that ends up coming up in real people, too. Like, it's the whole, like, is Popsar feminist? I don't know. There's stuff Taylor Swift is done. There's stuff Taylor Swift has said that has been, yes, very feminist, very empowering for women. She's also, I don't know, she's a human woman who makes mistakes and like I'm not looking to her to form my like political proxas. But yeah, no, I think with the stuff with like Kanye and all that, I think there was sort of a like, we need there to be like a staunch villain and a staunch hero in a situation. And I'm like, yeah, Kanye sucks. Like, I don't, you're, I'm not disagreeing with that. Like, but like, I don't know. Celebrities, I don't really think any of them are probably like particularly

really great people. They like, just from the nature of like getting that rich, you kind of have to be a little bit flawed. I don't know. But yeah, no, it is like a weird, like there's this weird sort of tendency, I think, lately for people,

maybe it's just a reflection of how, like, messed up the world is right now, but like people really do want to, like, see these figures, like, having all of their beliefs. And it's like, at the end of the day, they're probably not. Yeah. And it's always been that way. Like, I don't know.

I completely agree. And I think we'll talk about this more when we get deeper into the report. But I do think it has created a kind of dynamic where defending Taylor Swift is easily confused for a kind of activism. It is. Yeah. Well, it's the thing too where I think, like, because what we were saying before about how she sort of represents this, like, the idea of womanhood, the idea of specifically white

womanhood, but womanhood in general, like, when people talk about misogyny, yes, she, she has been subject to a lot of misogyny throughout her career. That being said, feminism is. isn't just defending Taylor Swift. I don't know. Yeah. Let's take a quick break. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guide.

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real people were boosting it and helping it to spread, this is like part and parcel of online manipulation campaigns. The pattern of inauthentic provocation leading to authentic user discourse is a hallmark of successful narrative manipulation. It demonstrates how small bursts of coordinated activity can reshape cultural perception by forcing mainstream audiences to respond to extremized framing. Okay, so if you are a diehard Swifty listening, you might be thinking, okay, so does this report mean that anybody who is critical of Taylor Swift is just a bot? And whatever criticisms they raised can just be ignored because it's bot shit? And the answer is no, absolutely not, not even a little bit.

So we do have some criticisms of the report, which we'll get into in a moment, but even taking it at face value, I want to make super clear that the report, as you just heard in that summary, does not suggest that all or even most of the accounts driving this kind of Taylor Swift conversation online were bots. And I want to really underline that because one of the responses I've seen online from this report is that the report is saying that anybody who criticized Taylor Swift is a bot and can be disregarded. I've seen a lot of black women saying, I have been critical of Taylor Swift and I am not a bot. I'm a real person with real issues. I understand where that's coming from, which again, we'll talk about it in a moment. But I just want to make clear that the report is not saying this. And so if anybody is saying, oh, well, I told you so, all these criticisms about Taylor Swift are just coming from bots. You were stupid for even engaging with it.

That is not correct. So in this report, they basically categorized different buckets of Taylor Swift. conversation along the lines of the risk of those conversations being manipulated by inauthentic narratives. Topics that were in what they call their low risk cluster are topics that were largely human-driven and not really driven at all by bots. So this was things like people being uncomfortable with some of the racialized messages, I guess, and some of the songs like eldest daughter and opalite. It was human saying that stuff, not bots. Side note, I am actually not listened to any of these song. So I gather

from the discourse that a lot of it was about racialized narratives in these songs, but I'm going to need Joey to confirm that for me. Or just icky narratives in general. Yeah. I think I

right. I think because I'll be like of this discussion again, I didn't list of the album and think oh this means she's a trad wife now. This means she's a racist trot wife. The song Opelite though specifically.

There were a couple of I think it was the situation where I think she just due to being a white woman who has achieved this level of wealth and probably has mostly been surrounded by other white women from similar backgrounds. Maybe she just didn't like think through it enough.

Like I'm willing to give her the benefit of doubt of that. There was a little bit like looking at the lyrics sort of like this feels icky. Like, there's something about it that I'm like, oh, um, I don't know about that. I'm crediting this. Again, I'm going to give her the benefit of the doubt. Again, this is a celebrity. I don't know in person. I don't know what her fucking beliefs are. I don't know anything about her. We've never met. Shocking, guys. I've never personally met Taylor Swift. I'm willing to throw this to just like, she made some metaphors that she thought were really artsy,

not really realizing they could be read that way. Like, this is the same way. This is the same way. I like, there was a, I'm not going to out here for what she actually said, but like my straight friend a couple months ago had like left a comment on my Instagram and the words she used. I was like, you cannot say that. I was like delete that right now. That's not a word for you think it is. Yeah, I was like, you just called me something very transphobic. Like I was like, I know that was not what you meant. But yeah, um, I'm willing to say, I think that's probably what happened. That being said, though, I'm not going to like criticize anybody for being uncomfortable with that. Um, that is our right? There's a piece of art that's in the world. People are allowed to interpret it however you want. Something that recently happened that I think made me sort of, well, I was on the other side of this was going back to this whole, like, having to take a step back and be like,

is this really an issue? When the Sabrina Carpenter album came out, the most recent Spreta Carpenter album, I'm not a big fan of her. And I think, like, I had a realization where I was like, she to me is where I was like similar to, I think, a lot of people to see Taylor's life, where I was like,

she's objectively very talented. She's not for me. Like, her music is not for me. It's not, I'm not the audience she has online. And I think, like, when that album came out and the cover drop specifically,

I was sort of like, okay, I don't love that. There's a lot of criticisms I have, but I can see how this can be a hovering to some people. And it was. However,

then I saw the conversation quickly turned. There were, like, people online that were like, if you're uncomfortable with this, your anti-sex work and anti-women and anti-sexic women and anti- and I was like, what are we talking about?

Like, I was just like, oh, that was a weird choice. I wouldn't do it, but good for you. Yeah. I mean, whatever happened to just being allowed to not like something or being like, this is not for me. I think that's my point where I'm like, I wouldn't actually have an issue with this. Like, I don't be like, end of discussion, whatever. It's not the album's not for me.

But I was like, well, now I feel like I have to come back and be like, no, guys, I'm not secretly a misogynist or anti-sex or anti-sex work or anti-t. There was one particular TikTok that I saw that was just like listing off all these things. And I was like, this is a straight white girl. What does this have to do with transphobia and sex workers' rights? And I like, I don't know. It was crazy. But yeah.

And I think that's kind of like what the report, it doesn't come out and say this, but sort of contextualizing it, I feel like the temperature has just really been turned up. And so you can't just really have a convert. It's more difficult to have normal good faith discourse where you're like, oh, this album wasn't for me. this cover wasn't for me. Like how you just articulated Taylor Swift, that's how I would describe her. Like, I don't have ill will toward her. She's just somebody who I recognize makes music

that is not, for whatever reason, for me. So it's not an artist that I pay attention to musically a lot. And so I think the fact that the conversation online has gotten so volatile about these things is exactly, speaks exactly to your point, Joey. Mike, you look like you were going to say something. Did I, did I? Yeah, well, I'm just.

curious now about the lyrics in these songs, Opel A, Nola's Daughter. I had no idea that, like, this was part of the controversy, I guess, that there are, like, racialized lyrics in there. And, I mean, it's also interesting that those are two of the topics that were not promoted by these inauthentic accounts,

and yet I didn't hear them. And, you know, that's interesting. And it makes me wonder if perhaps the conversation about those was in fact more nuanced than thoughtful like Joey was describing like, you know, it's a piece of art and so people can legitimately criticize it.

Maybe it wasn't, you know, polarized off the rails. Some of it probably was because we're talking about the internet here, but like, you know, you have to wonder if that nuance is why the bot networks did not pick that up and instead sees, on some of these other claims.

Yes, that's a really good point. And just to add on to that, one of the other sort of low-risk clusters that's report identified where the conversation was pretty much entirely just real people having real discourse in a mostly normal chill kind of way was around Taylor Swift being a billionaire

and the sort of ethics of that, right? That was real people raising real issues alongside real people talking about the, you know, racial imagery and some of the issues with her songs. The report specifically says that these topics remain stable and free from inorganic influence. So again, if someone is trying to tell you that, oh, all of the issues raised about Taylor Swift, that was all bots, these specifically were not raised by bots. They were raised by real people.

Then they identify the medium risk clusters. Now, this was stuff like comparisons of Taylor Swift to Kanye West, who, again, is like basically a Nazi now. The report found that this cluster showed the clearest transition from inauthentic triggers to authentic community discourse. However, it was still not bot users that were dominating this cluster of conversations. And so other things in this bucket were conversations around swift and cultural appropriation, which I didn't mind. Again, I am not a scholar of her work, but apparently that is a topic of conversation. Her use of A-A-A-V-E, a rivalry that she might have with Beyonce, which like, are they rivals for real?

This is, again, a lot of this is, like, new information for me that I'm hearing for the first time. Well, they're the two most famous women, so they must be rivals, right? I know, right? I bet they like each other. All women hate each other. All women hate each other, Bridget. Don't y'all know this by now? Can't have two powerful women in the same room?

Yeah, no, I mean, even, like, reading that, I personally, because I've heard this before, right? I'm like, I can't think of an example of Taylor Swift using AVE. That being said, like, I haven't followed her entire career. Maybe she did. Maybe I'm just missing it. But I'm like, whenever people claim that, I know people are also mad about like the shake-it-off music video and some of the dancing of that. I remember that. I remember that.

I remember that. Yeah. That one rings a bell. And like that one, too, I was sort of like, okay, I can get the criticism. But it doesn't really seem like that. I don't know. I, again, I think. and the rivalry with Beyonce.

Like I, that is something I'm like, I don't think I've actually, yeah, they're the two top artists in the country. I mean, if we want to go back to the whole Kanye of it all, Beyonce famously brought Heelers Swift on stage and 2009 after all that. So I'm like, it seemed like they were pretty chill from where I'm standing, but I don't know. And they're both billionaires. I don't think either than is sweating it.

Like, I think this is like, like, I'm also like, I love the like negative criticism that I have a Taylor Swift. but I also have Beyonce. Like, I love Beyonce too. Oh, but. But she's also a billionaire. I can make a whole episode, Joey.

I'm a big Beyonce fan. Beyonce and I have, this is a side conversation. This is a conversation for another episode. Beyonce and I have gone through a little bit of a cooling off period. I just think they're, well, we don't even get into it.

We don't get into it. I'll just say this. I have yet to piss off the, the Beehive. I've had a lot of other fandoms in my comments section angry at me over small remarks. So I hope this isn't the thing that finally is. Yeah, we can move on. I don't want anybody to get like bees and lemons in our Instagram comments over anything that we're about to say.

Yeah. It does make some sense, though. Like, if I was to design an inauthentic campaign just trying to like gin up outrage and get a bunch of clicks online, it makes a lot of sense to come up with a story about Taylor Swift and Beyonce having like a rivalry with each other because then I get to talk about both of them, right? And then I'm going to get picked up by algorithms of people who are interested in Easer. That's a really, really good point. Yeah, you're getting people with the BMOG in their username

and you're getting people with Taylor's version in parentheses after their username in your comments, making your life miserable for however long, they decide to pay attention to that. Total non-sequitur question that you can cut if you need to for time. As a fandom expert, which fandom do you think? It doesn't even have to be Beyonce versus Taylor Swift. Which fandom is the most rabid? The fandom that you're like, I will never piss them off.

I will never say a thing. You look like you've got an idea in your mind, your head. Here's the thing. And you must also consider jugglers. Oh, that's a good one. I don't think that they do. They're like, they're a. Okay.

Maybe this is just the generational differences, but... That's probably true. Yeah, like your grandfather is listening to the journalists. Actually, Bridgett, you're breaking up something I could spend an entire episode talking about. But with this whole conversation in general, too, something that I keep going back to, because again, I have, I said this where I was like, I have been hesitant to call myself a Swifty in the past. And I think it's because of the reputations that Swifties get. My first, like, fandom, fandom that I was into as a small child was, was Starry.

Wars and you have never met crazier. Actually, I take that bad. I like, here's the thing. Because it is, again, it's, there's something that makes Swifties like, compared to like the BTS fandom, Beyonce, Beatles fans. Like, have you ever talked to a middle-aged man about like whatever their band of choice? I don't know. And then on the other side, yeah, again, like Star Wars fans like literally like ruining the lives of like child actors on the other hand.

I think that there is just something about online fandom culture. I was talking to a friend like a week ago about she just got into like DC Comics for the first time and she was like, I'm really nervous to post anything on TikTok about this because I feel like people are going to be mad that I haven't read like XYZ things. And I'm like, you're talking about a character that's been around since pre-World War War. two, there's no way you can read all of the things. There's been a bazillion different versions. Like, there's just something about fandom culture that turns people. I love it. Again, I don't love that. I love fandoms. I, again, I will defend fandoms. I have my whole wall of posters behind me with like, there's an interview with a vampire one. There's a DC one.

There is a point where you kind of have to be like, I'm going to take a step back. I'm not going to gauge the discourse anymore. Somebody just left a very angry comment. on one of my videos because I made the mistake of saying something about how Anakin Skywalker is a flawed morally gray character, which, you know, I didn't think was that crazy of a assertion. I was talking about the portrait again.

I was like, that's like the whole thing of like many movies. The most unhinged comments I ever got from fandom for making a like offhanded joke about it was Adam Driver fans like to this day. And it was because I said that he did a bad job. If there was like a God, this is so old. There was like

some, it was like Vogue or something. There was like a video of a bunch of male actors reading one of the scripts from Clueless. And Adam Driver was just like giving nothing. And I made some comment about being, being like, yeah, he's doing terror. And I, I had to turn off my Twitter notifications for like 24 hours. I was just like, what? Yeah. Anyway, so that's to say, I don't think there's anything particularly like rabid about the, about the Swifties or Beyonce fans or whatever. Um, I think just because a lot of times they're young, women. I mean, Beyonce,

yeah, I would say Beyonce too. Beyonce mostly, it's like women, queer people. Yeah. I think because it's them, sports fans. Oh, yeah. I'm sorry.

Have you ever talked to an Eagles fan? Like, I, I don't know. So anyways, my point is, I just think that people are awful inherently and there's something about fandoms that makes us, I don't know. My favorite discussion of fans

and now I'm going to take us on a tangent. John Hodgman of the great judicial podcast, Judge John Hodgman, once articulated the difference between a nerd and a hipster, which I feel are like two different types of vandums. Like a nerd is someone who, like they both have deep arcane knowledge of something that most people don't know about. But a nerd is like excited to share it with you and like bring you in and help you understand why they get so much love and joy from this thing.

and a hipster wants to wield it like a weapon to like hit you over the head and make you feel like you aren't as good you don't know about the comic from like 1939 where they went to like the negaverse or whatever uh wait sorry Mike you don't know about that comic from 1989 no I know about it but I'm just saying there are like other people who like maybe don't like they're not like real fans you know yeah not like but yeah exactly but I always think about that distinction I like that framework. That's so real, though. That is exactly it's like, there, yeah, let's get into a bigger conversation to you. There is just like such a, like, just going back to the idea of art, which again with these songs,

like, there can be a song that you could put out there that like, like, I've had this happen. Going back to Taylor Swift, there are like, I, like, one song by her that I really like is the archer. It's a little bit of a corny song, objectively. But it's, I really like it. It's really meaningful to me.

It was like, really, I, I, it's a, it's a good song. And it like had meant a lot to me at a point in my life where I was like going for a lot of stuff. And I like had it on like I was driving one time and I had it on the car and my friend was with with me and they were like, oh my God, like this is stupid. Like what are you like listening to? And I was like, all right. Like I was like, but I had a moment where I was just like, we have different interpretations of this.

That's okay. This isn't for you. This is for me. I'm going to ask you and I was sort of like, hey, I really like this song. Can you not make fun of it? And they were like, oh shit, yeah. They've also showed me plenty of stuff that I'm like, I don't get. get this, but I'm glad that it means something to you.

At the end of the day, art is supposed to mean different things to different people. And like, there is, I think, what you were saying, like, the hipster kind of side of it is, like, forgetting that and being like, well, everybody has to have my point of view. Yeah. Which is just how the world works. I don't know. Right. It's just like a way to exclude people and, like, protect your exclusive access to, like,

whatever this thing is. 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.

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Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, uh, you only got in because you're, Terrence made a huge donation. The group. The yard birds, right? That's the name.

The Harvard Yardt Yardt. 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.

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Call 844-Eight to get started. That's 844-844-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.

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Well, the high-risk clusters, these are the clusters that were heavily seated by non-typical accounts and drove the downstream effects with authentic users were things like, yep, the Nazi symbolism conversation, conspiracy accusations, political reframing and MAGA allegations. And then a bucket that they call relationship politicization, parentheses Kelsey NFL. I think some of it's the trad wife, the trad wife stuff. Yeah, I assume that topic is just like anything to do with Kelsey

is just kind of roll up and shoved into that bucket. Yes. So have you all seen the response to this study online? Because in my pockets of the internet, the response has been massive. I don't know that I've seen something kind of instantly polarize the internet in such a stark way in a long time. Have you all been paying attention to any of the response?

Yeah, I have only seen the stuff that you showed me, Bridget, because I am like so far offline these days. I look at Reddit, which just not talk about any current events. It's all like history subredits and blue sky, which is its own thing, like, screaming about this or that, but not Taylor Swift, I guess. I haven't just because I unrelated to this

is sort of been taking a break from social media this week. However, I did bring this up with a couple people in my life over the last 24 hours and I was like, oh, I'm working on a Taylor Swift story and they immediately were like, oh, the Rolling Stone article and I was like, uh, yep.

So it was making it like, like it's making its way around. Yeah. Yeah. And one of the things that I sort of can't not talk about with this is the racial implications at play because I think a lot of the women who were, not all, but a lot of the folks who are critiquing Taylor Swift are black women, people of color. And I think a lot of the people who perhaps self-identify as Swifties,

who are very vocal about the fact that, you know, like, hey, anybody who's criticizing her, this article says they were all bots, which again is not true. I think, you know, you can already sort of see how maybe these different types of people are talking about Taylor Swift, but they're really talking about other stuff, race, gender, class, politics. And then the conversation kind of becomes a stand-in for all of this. And I specifically saw a lot of black women saying, you know, I am not a bot. I'm a real person. This was my actual critique, and I want to make that clear.

One of the things that I think this study perhaps did not make super clear is the authentic voices who those folks were and what they were saying. I think that that perhaps gave a bit of credence to people who were like, oh, you don't even need to listen to these people. They're bots anyway. And so one of the big questions that people have been asking is like, is this study legit? Like, should it be taken at face value? What's the deal? So Mike and I have been in conversation with the authors of this study. We're going to have a deeper dive episode into the methodologies that they used. But I wanted to talk about sort of what people are saying about this study to give you a sense before we go into those. those deeper conversations. A lot of the folks who were genuinely critical of Taylor Swift were feeling kind of suss about this study. So I wanted to sort of get into some of the buckets of critique

that I have seen floating around online about this study. The first is that the methodology that the study put together is just not a sound one. Mike, as our resident data analyst, what can you tell us about the methodology behind this report as a data scientist? So for one thing, an analysis like this requires tons of decisions on the part of the analyst. You know, which posts and accounts are they going to look at?

What time period are they going to consider? What are they going to measure? How are they going to measure that? All of those decisions are going to have a big impact on the results and the conclusions. And for studies like this, like there isn't a single standard way to do it because the best methodology depends on the particular research questions that they're attempting to answer. And so a lot of the critical. of their methodology that I've seen is quite vague, where the person posting the criticism isn't really being specific about which of those analytic decisions they object to, and instead

are just dismissing the whole thing as like biased or flawed, which feels a little lazy to me. There are definitely some thoughtful exceptions to that, where people are raising, like, very specific and very valid concerns about the study, and we are going to talk about them. And certainly, the study is not perfect. and interpreting the results of even the best studies, though, requires being honest about acknowledging their limitations. So one also needs to consider the practical limitations of what is possible with available resources.

Analysis are difficult and complicated and time-consuming. In this Taylor Swift data set, the researchers examined 18,000 posts. It would have been great if they'd had a trained human expert manually review each individual post and look at the social media history of the account that posted it, what sort of things they talk about,

who they're connected to, and then make a determination about whether it's a real human or an inauthentic bot account pretending to be an ordinary human. But a study like that would cost thousands of dollars, maybe tens of thousands of dollars. And, you know, I personally believe

that the integrity of our online spaces and discourse is critically undervalued and there should be much more funding to do robust studies to examine who is manipulating our discourse. But unfortunately, that's just like not the world that we live in right now in 2025 America. And funding for that kind of research

is not abundant to say the least, right? And in fact, to my knowledge, this report from Gudea is literally the only published analysis that provides any data on online discourse about this Taylor Swift narrative during this time frame at all, right? I haven't done an exhaustive search. Maybe it's out there.

I'd love to see it. Please send it if you have it. But to my knowledge, this is the only thing we've got. And so given that extreme dearth of available data, I think it would be foolish to completely dismiss this study because it is imperfect. I would much rather rely on data, even if that data is impacted by limitations and caveats, then rely 100% on vibes and my own personal experience with the algorithm that I'm looking at.

Does that make sense? It's not really an answer. I have more, but I did want to pause there. Yeah, it does make sense. And I should mention this too, that Mike, you and I were able to speak to an outside expert, Molly Dwyer, who works for a kind of similar company

that does similar kinds of reports. And we'll hear from her. We have a fascinating conversation. Also, Joey, Tumbler fan. Tumblr is what got her into this work in the first place, which is very interesting. What's funny is that when I was trying to figure out what expert voices I wanted to turn to

to help put together our conversation about what's going on in this report, you were like, oh, I found this person, Molly Dwyer. They put together a similar report about bot networks impacting the conversation around the Cracker Barrel logo redesign. Remember that? And I was like, Mike, I don't think that some data scientist is going to want to chime in on a report

that she had nothing to do with. She's not going to, we can ask her, but she's not going to want to, like, tear apart somebody else's report. And boy, was I wrong. And you were like, that is all scientists like to do is to not tear into. I shouldn't say that, but, like, look at and talk about the work of other scientists. You were like, as a scientist, it did not surprise me at all that she was very happy to talk about the findings on this report. Absolutely, 100%. I mean, we, as scientists, we are trained to be.

skeptical. We are trained to find the reasons why your data does not support your conclusion, right? Because by doing that, we eliminate the bad data and then we're left with like the data that does actually support the conclusion. And that's how we know things about the world, right? And so I think, you know, rather than a binary question of whether the methodology for this particular report about Taylor Swift discourse is sound or unsound, I think the better question is you know, is the methodology

sufficiently robust that we have confidence in its conclusions or that the conclusions, or at least in the neighborhood of correct. And in my opinion, I think the answer is yes. And, you know, like you said, we spoke with Molly Dwyer. Listeners will get to hear from her on Tuesday. And I really

encourage them to listen because she really had a lot of good stuff to say. You know, she generally agreed. She was like, yeah, their approach is like pretty fine. You know, there are places to quibble, certainly. Like, oh, maybe I would have done this a little bit differently. Maybe the exact percentages are a little rough. But like the overall pattern of the results seem pretty well supported.

And also, importantly, in line with other studies that have looked at similar questions in different contexts, which is an important way for us to have confidence in analyses when, you know, it's not possible or practical to do a perfect design of the study that you might want to. And so just briefly, there are two aspects of the approach that they use here that I do want to emphasize. One is the algorithm that they use for classifying accounts as either typical or atypical. Atypical is sort of synonymous with like a bot account or an automated account. And then the other piece of their analysis that I wanted to highlight was how it was longitudinal, that they didn't just look at the mix of typical and atypical accounts posting about Swift,

but they looked at how that mixture changed over time. And they found an early surge of posts from atypical accounts right after her album launched, which kind of helped set the tone for the narrative, some of those high-risk topics that you talked about earlier. those atypical accounts were then later eclipsed in volume by more typical users as they joined the conversation and it became like a viral trending topic. And then later those typical humans kind of lost interest in this story because you can only talk about a lightning bolt being a piece of Nazi iconography for so long before it becomes boring. Those humans like stopped posting.

And so the proportion of the inauthentic bots, the inauthentic accounts increased at that point as they were like trying to keep the conversation going. And I just think that that kind of temporal analysis adds a lot of nuance to help us understand the role of bots and inauthentic accounts and shaping these conversations, nuance that really gets lost in black and white social media posts

that either want to claim that this report either totally vindicates Taylor Swift or is completely flawed. and tells us nothing. 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, 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, 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 me.

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Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Let us show you at iHeartadvertising.com. That's iHeartadvertising.com. 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.

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Mike, something that you bring up, and it came up in our conversation with Molly as well, was that I've seen this criticism that, oh, this isn't really like a data company. They're not data scientists. This is a PR firm pretending to do data analysis. And when I asked Molly about this, she had actually a very interesting answer, which was that it is true that. companies like hers, companies like Gudea are often working on behalf of clients or brands or celebrities, but that doesn't really make them PR. And she made this great point that we don't really,

kind of like what you were alluding to before, we don't really have a lot of places anymore where you can get like academic insights into the internet, right? There used to be a very robust community and field of study for researchers and academics of all stripes and all kinds to, like, look at API and see what was going on online. And a lot of that has really dried up and come to an end. And so what we do have in the absence of that is these private companies. And so they're not perfect. I'm not saying that.

I wish that we had more robust, well-funded spaces to look into what's happening online. However, one of the big criticisms that I also saw of this report was that they did not really make their data set transparent. And so I could not like replicate that. I could not say, I want to dig into this myself and use their data set to replicate their results to confirm them, right? And when you and I were talking about this, Mike, I was like, well, I kind of get it on the one hand. Like, this is a consequence of more and more private companies doing the research into what's happening online to tell us what's happening on the internet. However, these are private companies. So they might have less transparency.

They might be able to say, oh, we were not going to make this public because it's a proprietary secret, whatever. To be sure, there are private companies that do operate with a better level of transparency, but I do think that this is sort of a function of having to depend on the whims and the particularities of private companies to provide robust research into what's happening on the internet. Do you know what I'm saying? Totally. I completely agree. I 100% agree that I wish they had released their data and made it publicly available. Like, I can't really think of a really compelling reason not to. I mean, I guess, again, it would be extra expense in time for them. So that's a concern, right?

They would have to probably take some steps to make sure that there wasn't any sensitive information in there, that they weren't exposing people's privacy. But companies do this, you know? It is possible. And it is unfortunate that they didn't make it transparent because that is one of, in my opinion, in the most valid criticisms of this study is that we kind of have to take their word for it. But at the same time, it's like they don't have

some sort of intense competing interest here. Like they're trying a company like Gudea, which works on behalf of clients to measure narratives around their brands, they put out a report like this maybe a little bit because they want to be a good actor in society. You know, we can hope that that's part of it,

but also because they want to get some press for themselves as a company that does good quality analyses and shares insightful conclusions. And so they have a motivation to get it right, you know? And so the idea that they would just like make things up doesn't really hold a lot of water. And especially in this context that you described where companies like Reddit and X and Meta

have shut off researcher access to their APIs, which we used to be able to use to do this kind of research. It used to be a very low barrier for a grad student somewhere or even just like a normal person sitting at their desk at home. If they had this sort of question, they could do this research pretty easily using Twitter's API. But, you know, Elon Musk shut that off

because he didn't want people poking around to publish data about how completely filled with bots their ecosystem is because what brand is going to want to buy ads on a platform that's just like serving them up to bots. So there's that. We lost the API access, and we've lost so much funding for the kind of research that looks into this stuff that we as just like members of the public we really have no choice at this particular moment,

but to make peace with the fact that a lot of the data that we are able to use to answer questions like this are going to come from private companies. That's just the state of things until we change it. Yeah. And, you know, one of the other kind of buckets of criticism I've seen floating around the internet is, oh, Gudea, they're an AI company. They used AI to put this report together. to me, this is kind of a weird claim to debunk the whole study, which I just, I don't think it's fair.

The company's full name is Gudea AI and its website says that it offers AI services. But it is important to note that just like other socialisting tools like Hootsweed or other tools that maybe you've used, this is machine learning. It is not what we call generative AI. So like a quick and dirty summary of the difference is that machine learning has been a staple of technology for decades. It analyzes existing data for predictions and classifications and decisions. Kind of like when you go on to Netflix, the recommended shows, that's machine learning. The way that your Gmail knows what emails are spam and filters them out, that's machine learning. It operates on rules and patterns.

While generative AI creates entirely new content through learning complex patterns from dataset. So think of that as things like SORA or ChatGPT, which is why it takes a lot more processing power than just a general machine learning. So the real difference here is creation versus analysis and prediction. So this company having AI as one of their work streams doesn't really mean anything really. Like it's not a very, I don't think it's even a real criticism. This is kind of a tangent, but Mike, you and I got into a whole thing about how companies will put AI in their name, even if they aren't even really AI companies as kind of a marketing term, even though they're not using AI the way we think of it, like with chat GPT. And I mean, I don't think it takes

a genius to guess why a company would do that, like, why I would be like, oh, my company is podcast.com.com. Instead of just podcast, because it's marketing. It makes people look at them twice. It probably helps them fundraise and get more money. I totally get it. Yeah. I mean, just ask friend of the show, Ed Zedrone, right? Like, a huge portion. of our whole economy is propped up by AI marketing hype. Depending on what sector you work in, you would be a fool not to put AI in your company name. So I would probably say, I mentioned this earlier, but probably my biggest criticism of the study is that I just don't think it does a great job of really breaking down the authentic conversations about Taylor Swift. even though they make clear that the majority of the conversations that were happening were authentic people and not bots,

I just think that a lot of the nuance was easily lost there. Like, who are these authentic people? What were the narratives that they actually cared about? What were the narratives? How were those narratives moving alongside these inauthentic bot-driven narratives? Like, I can kind of see how people who are critical of this study are now saying, oh, you know, the study is saying that everybody who hates Taylor Swift as a bot, even though the study didn't actually say that,

I can sort of get why that's the narrative that is sort of spreading because the study does not spend a lot of time flushing out that nuance. Again, the study itself is in no way saying that everybody that was critical of Taylor Swift is a bot, but I get how this seems like a very limited view into these authentic voices to the point where people are saying

they feel like their voices being erased by this report. And I guess I would be remiss to not mention the Rolling Stone of it all because the findings are reported in an exclusive piece for Rolling Stone. Now, I don't know how this lands for the both of you. The person who wrote the piece is somebody who's been on the show before, Miles Cleef, you know, Rolling Stone is a music publication, right? I've spent my fair share amount of time in, like, celebrity media. And a lot of times, publications like this are working hand and glove with celebrity PR. And so it's hard for me to say, that an outlet like Rolling Stone is going to be impartial when they're reporting on a huge musician like Taylor Swift, right?

People have pointed out that Roland Stone did a Taylor Swift takeover during one of her album's launches. They rated her album five out of five stars. I don't really have the answer here, but it's a question that I've seen come up kind of a lot. And the way that the article is framed for folks who don't know, the people who write articles don't also write the headlines. That's the editor. And so Miles Clee, who wrote up the piece, it's not the person who wrote this headline, probably. But the headline is Taylor Swift's last album sparked bizarre accusations of Nazism.

It was a coordinated attack. Now, if when you get into the nitty gritty of what the report is saying, that's kind of a bold claim that the report doesn't actually make. Like that title is saying like case close, smoking gun, coordinated attack, in a way that the study, would you actually read it? it like we've all done doesn't actually make clear. And so I just, you know, in our interview with Molly who runs peak metrics, a similar kind of social listening company as the one that did this study, she told us that like at baseline, some percentage of internet discourse is generated

by bots. It's just the reality. It is unfortunately in this day and age somewhat commonplace. So framing a report that suggests unusual activity around Taylor Swift discourse as a coordinated attack isn't really right because, like, sadly, bots is just part of the internet now. That's just like part of how online discourse happens. And so, again, you can sort of see how it sets up this narrative that Taylor Swift is a victim of something who needs to be defended. And she kind of is in a kind of way, but also what they're describing is at this point somewhat commonplace. Does that make sense? Yeah. I think also to that headline specifically saying, like, bizarre accusations of Nazism. Two things can be true where it's like, I would agree with that that like, yeah,

the high risk, like, straight up accusations of Nazism, like, she made this necklace, which again, she personally didn't make the necklace, but like, whatever, people were mad about the lightning bolts. Like, yeah, on the one hand, that is kind of insane. That is sort of a far bench claim. On the other hand, like, saying this, was like saying that the album sparked accusations of Nazism is like ignoring some of the real criticism of it, which again, I don't know like, I don't know how newsworthy some of it is. I don't know how like some of it being, again, Taylor's so for writing a song that I was like, oh, I like Elvis Daughter, the lyrics were kind of corny. I didn't really like it.

I don't think we need a whole article about that. Like, so it's really, yeah, like, things can be true. It can on the one hand, like, there were bizarre accusations. There was a lot of misinformation, but saying that's all it was. Like, yeah, and again, that is just sort of a media atmosphere. I mean, like, I, we've done a bazillion episodes about, like, review bombing and every form of media. Like, this just sort of is the reality now, which is a bad thing. It's a bad thing that it's happening, and we should be talking about it. But there is sort of a weird thing that happens then where it's like any criticism of a thing is just

bots or it's review bombing where it's actually rooted in XYZ you're a misogynist you're a whatever sometimes people just don't like things I don't know if we look if we really look at that title though I think the word bizarre in that title is really

doing a lot of work to like just like needle people and it's almost like gaslighting like Joey was saying there are some like valid reasons to be concerned about some of the content in her album, I gather, right? Like, I don't personally know, but that's the sense that I get. And so, you know, accusations of Nazism, okay, maybe that's a little bit much, but, like,

calling it bizarre in the headline, I have to wonder if that one word bizarre really was, like, a big catalyst of a lot of the backlash to this particular article. And when you go back and look at the bucket of conversation that the report says, oh, this was not inauthentic. This was all just real listeners, real critics, real people, real voices, real discourse. It was all about exactly what you two were just talking about, like actually speaking to the album, the songs, the symbolism that it brought up, whether you liked it or not, whether you thought it was problematic or not. And I have to imagine that's not sexy. people having authentic people having like normal discourse, whether critical or celebratory or somewhere in the middle,

I can understand the need to spice that up because, yeah, just normal people having normal conversation about their views on an album. No, that's not sexy. So, yeah, I think that we've gotten to this place where even when people are just trying to engage a normal discourse about the world, inauthentic accounts cannot help but throw a match into that. dynamic and light it on fire and ignite it. And something about the title, I think, really probably turned people off of what is in

this report from the first blush of even looking at it. I can't say how many people actually dug into the report. Most people are probably reading the title, the Rolling Stone Piece, and maybe skimming it or reading it. And so, yeah, I just, I'm not surprised that it's been, it sparked such backlash. And I guess that's kind of my so what he's. is that, you know, everybody, people who listen to this podcast, Swiftys, Taylor Swift critics, people who don't care about Taylor Swift at all, just want to have a robust internet landscape.

All of those people coming together really remind us that the internet is not just bots in chaos. It's also real people trying to make real sense of culture in real time. And so I just think that we got to remember that. I don't think that this report serves to invalidate anybody's critiques or discomfort that they might have felt or any of that, I think it just shows that some conversations are more vulnerable to outside manipulation than others. It's just not a judgment.

It's on anyone. It is just a function and a reality of this current media climate that we are all kind of navigating together. This feels like the pop culture equivalent of like whenever leftists online disagree with each other and they immediately start calling each other, like CIA

assets or something. Yes. It's just hitting me now. Maybe this is another thing. The Swiftie is really, this is where again, we're all, we're just living in a reality

where everything is, we fandomized everything. So maybe that's it. But I, at this, like, it just hit me that I was like, why does this sound so familiar? And I was like, oh, like, this is like what I talked to,

like, friends of the pod, our cool zone media peeps about like them being accused of being CIA assets. And it's like, no, they're not. Like, you just disagree with what they're saying. I don't know what's tell you, dude. People have different opinions. That's how you know you've made it.

When you get accused of being like a CIA plant, it's like, you've made it. You've arrived. I just wish we had a little bit more room for nuance in politics. And also, in just our ability to enjoy pop culture. Because at the end of the day, like, that's what this is about. This is about art that we're supposed to enjoy or not enjoy

and just move on with your life. Listen to something else. I don't know. I think there's some real optimism in this report that we can find, though, that like, it's actually backing up that, like, the humans do want some of that nuance. And, you know, this, one of my big takeaways from this report

is just underscoring how much our online conversations are affected by bots and manipulation campaigns all the time. Like, it's not just Taylor Swift, it's not just Blake lively. It's not just politics. It's not just health. It's like all of it, right? And some of it's for ideological reasons.

But I think a lot of it is just people trying to get engagement for monetization. We saw that when Twitter started revealing people's locations of accounts. And we saw that, like, oh, a lot of these, like, Maga account. and also like super leftist accounts all seem to be based out of like random places in the global south where like kind of sits like maybe these people aren't ideologically invested

they're just trying to get engagement and that's just like a feature of the internet now and so maybe the more that we acknowledge that and recognize it as a fact of life it will create some space for us to sort of like look past it find the other humans out there for some actual authentic engagement. Oh, what a positive place to end.

Joey, Mike, thank you for breaking this down for me. Nice to put you two in conversation at long last. Of course. Finally. That's what this is really about, guys. The episode just kind of came about. But this is just the three of us want to hang out finally. Yeah, always.

Again, we will have a few more deep dives into the report. very soon. This was just our initial, let's just get on the mic and see what comes out feelings. That sounded weird because Mike is one of our producers, but you know what I mean? Yeah, thanks so much for listening. I will see you on the internet. 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.com. 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. Tari 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.

Another podcast from some SNL, late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, S&L's Mikey Day and headwriter, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform?

We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple 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 and the mindset that keeps them moving forward. At our level, at this scale, being able to fail in front of the entire world. Like, I can do anything. I can do anything. 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 IHart Women's Sports. Last night, a blown call changed a game. 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, and the stuff nobody gets to hear. Listen to Sports Slice on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more, follow Timbo Slicalife 12 in the TikTok podcast network on TikTok. Hi, everyone. I'm Cheryl Strait, author of Wild and Tiny Beautiful Things. 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

inner landscapes that informed and inspired their extraordinary feats. So we too can better understand how to face our own seemingly insurmountable challenges. Listen to Mind Over Mountain every Thursday on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. What's up, fam? It's Isaiah Thomas. And I'm C.J. Toledano. It's our favorite time of the year on our podcast point game, the playoffs. We're digging into the biggest surprises of the season. And I'm looking back on some of my greatest playoff moments.

If we didn't talk ever again, I was crying. You just understood. That's how personal it got. Wow. Then after that game seven, Mark keep coming to, he's like, you know I love you, dog. You know, it's all love. This was just playoffs. This was just basketball.

So listen to Point Game on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human