On December 9th, Rolling Stone published a story that some saw as a bombshell: a network of coordinated, “inauthentic” social media accounts had a hand in the weekslong discourse that trailed the release of Taylor Swift’s recent album, The Life of a Showgirl.
It was a big deal for those in the Swiftie/anti-Swiftie universe. Immediately following the record’s release in October, discussion of Showgirl was fan- and critic-driven — passionate but fairly calm. Listeners debated the meaning of songs, analyzed the flood of material for hidden meanings, and questioned whether the music was even good. Some fans took issue with specific lyrics, especially around Swift’s use of slang or metaphors. But at some point the discussion took a turn, and soon the tenor on social media was about whether Swift was hiding Nazi imagery into her output, or whether she was secretly MAGA. (The musician endorsed Kamala Harris for president in 2024.) Soon enough in corners of the internet, the album release was consumed by fights over whether Swift was signaling a hard right-wing pivot.
On its surface, the conversations might seem like standard fandom and anti-fandom, prompted by a much-hyped album from an artist that a lot of people have big feelings about. But the cycle of trending discourse snowballing into wall-to-wall social media activity is more than a fan rabbit hole: it’s an example of how uneven incentives turbocharge the sludge in our contemporary media ecosystem.
Two months later, new research by a little-known social listening firm seemed to upend what the public knew about how that viral discourse spread. Rolling Stone reported on research compiled by a company called Gudea, which promises clients “early visibility into rising narratives” on social media platforms. Gudea had analyzed 24,679 posts from 18,213 users on 14 different online platforms as they discussed Swift in the days following the album release. According to the report, “inauthentic” narratives that started on fringe platforms like 4chan eventually jumped to other more mainstream platforms like X and TikTok, where real people began debating whether Swift was pushing Nazi symbols and comparing Swift with Kanye West.
“This demonstrates how a strategically seeded falsehood can convert into widespread authentic discourse, reshaping public perception even when most users do not believe the originating claim,” the report reads. For some Swift fans, it was incontrovertible proof that negative discourse was the work of bots and agents of chaos. They took a victory lap.
But now Gudea’s report and Rolling Stone’s coverage has triggered a second wave of arguments that have at times spiraled into a new and ever-expanding web of theories: about Swift and her covert PR moves, Gudea and Rolling Stone, and the very act of posting online.
“No, you goofballs — Taylor Swift is not the hapless victim of a bot campaign,” one TikTok with 418,000 views begins. “You just don’t have any media literacy and you got bamboozled.”
On the other end of the spectrum, a separate TikTok user shared a video that amounted to “I told you so,” defending Swift and sharing the Rolling Stone piece. “So many opportunities to be smug this year,” the caption read. “I am taking all of them.”
And it all started with a bare-bones report that threw gasoline on a perpetual fire.
Gudea is part social listening, part public relations firm: “By translating complex online activity into clear, decision-ready intelligence, GUDEA helps communicators act sooner, proactively manage risk, and respond with confidence,” the company website reads. The startup has been around since 2023, but when the report was published, the company website was sparse. It’s the only report of its kind on the site, and there’s little information about Gudea’s personnel or previous clients. That led to accusations by Swift critics that Gudea was spun up and hired specifically to publish a report that was sympathetic to the pop star — perhaps even colluding with Swift and Rolling Stone to launder her image via the press. Some claimed Gudea was an “AI company” deploying generative AI to discredit legitimate critiques of The Life of a Showgirl. And perhaps most offensively: that the report was taking criticism coming from real people and writing it off as bot behavior.
There was plenty of organic criticism of the album and Swift’s persona more generally, particularly around lyrics and symbolism that some listeners — especially Black women — called out as racist. It follows yearslong commentary about Swift’s role in pop culture and politics as a rich, powerful white woman who is able to bend national conversations to her will and grab and retain attention on her personal projects, but only when she wants to. Some people took the Gudea report to be saying that these real, human-driven frustrations were, essentially, not real.
“Fuck you @rollingstone for saying that the outrage against Taylor Swift was “bot manufactured” when the ourtage came from Black Women. Actual. Human. Beings,” a post on Threads reads. “Are you teaming up with American Eagle? … Because the racism is LOUD.”
Miles Klee, the Rolling Stone reporter who covered Gudea’s findings, told The Verge that the outlet did not commission the report and that Swift is not a Gudea client.
“Contrary to some readings of the article, it does not suggest that every account alleging that Swift supports Trump or harbors white supremacist views was part of an influence network,” Klee wrote in an email. “Certainly, there were and are many people making those claims in earnest. But a significant amount of this content has come from a small subset of coordinated accounts that don’t behave like typical social media users. The public should understand that when they see extreme rhetoric online, it may originate from bad actors looking to manipulate the conversation.”
Jessica Maddox, an associate professor at the University of Georgia who studies social media, says that the conversation following the album release had all the hallmarks of inauthentic activity that she teaches her students to look for.
“It’s a beautiful, sunny day, and then all of a sudden … out of the blue, here comes the afternoon thunderstorm. It’s a bad one, there’s wind, there’s rain, there’s lightning, thunder, and then almost as fast as it came on, it’s gone,” Maddox says. “It has dissipated and it’s back to being a sunny day. Bot activity is kind of like that.”
Inauthentic engagement is intense, short-lived, and includes repeated refrains or sayings that recur across posts and users. Maddox — who intentionally discloses that she is a fan of Swift — also found it curious that the flavor of discourse was similar across multiple platforms. Typically when content jumps platforms there’s a sense of judgement or ridicule, she says: X users laughing about the weird thing TikTok users are doing, for example.
“I saw more of what felt like copy-and-paste topics and refrains and ideas being moved around almost too neatly compared to how discourse normally functions online,” Maddox told The Verge.
The Gudea report tracks how narratives emerged and proliferated over the course of several weeks and found that the 3.77 percent of users displaying nontypical behavior drove more than a quarter of the volume of discussion on platforms. (Gudea defines inauthentic accounts as those that “operate in ways that distort the online conversation,” like having automated posting patterns, repeating identical messages at scale, or coordinating with networks of other accounts.) Gudea also mapped and clustered different narratives that were circulating, and found that three topics were amplified by “nontypical” accounts: Nazi symbolism and conspiracies, allegations that Swift is MAGA, and the politicization of Swift’s relationship with NFL player Travis Kelce.
But lost in much of the discourse — and coverage — around the report is that Gudea acknowledges the vast majority of people were acting like typical users and that much of the discourse was “stable and free from inorganic influence.” Gudea found that discussion around cultural appropriation and Swift’s use of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) was authentic, as were general critiques of the album quality and meta commentary around Swift’s wealth and ethics. Gudea says the clearest example of inauthentic actors sowing the seeds of discourse came when accusations that Swift was using Nazi imagery successfully prompted real people to compare her to Kanye West.
“Typical users flood in, not to support the conspiracy, but to contextualize it, criticize it, or draw comparisons to Kanye West,” the report reads. “This surge ironically strengthens the narrative’s visibility by increasing conversation volume and engagement velocity.” Gudea says the narrative began on 4chan and subsequently moved through Discord, Reddit, Bluesky, and X.
“If you don’t go past the headline, it is easy and completely valid and fair to feel like, wait a minute, I am a human. I did feel these things. Why am I almost being gaslit by a company?” Maddox says. “You are being called essentially a liar and inauthentic and not human, which in this age of AI, I can’t think of anything more insulting.”
Gudea acknowledges the vast majority of people were acting like typical users
The report’s findings are fairly narrow — but once the top-line findings came down, it was disseminated, decontextualized, and reshared for maximum attention. Like many intense fan and anti-fan communities, nuance is lost as the news ripples outward and new theories and repeated falsehoods take hold. Keith Presley, cofounder and CEO of Gudea, told The Verge in an email that the report was produced independently and that the company was not asked by any outside party to put it together. Presley said Gudea contacted “counsel believed to represent Taylor Swift using publicly available legal contact information” after the report was completed; Gudea didn’t hear back.
“Gudea does not serve as an arbiter of truth. Our objective is to illuminate the underlying structure of how content is repurposed and disseminated in a coordinated manner to influence broader discourse,” Presley said in an email. “Whether a narrative is true or false is not the analytical focus; rather, we examine how actors generate polarization, segment audiences into opposing camps, and manipulate platform algorithms to achieve strategic or harmful outcomes.”
Swift’s publicist Tree Paine did not respond after The Verge said her request to be “Off the record but on background only and not to be quoted,” violates our long-standing background policy for communications professionals.
The report was provided exclusively to Rolling Stone, Presley says, because it aligned with the writer’s beat — a typical arrangement for a small firm hoping to generate media coverage for its services. Presley also clarified that the company uses generative AI only at the final interpretive stage of reports; deep learning models are used to identify patterns from large amounts of data collected from hundreds of platforms. Presley says that instead of using simple keyword searches to collect posts, Gudea uses “entity-based monitoring and platform-wide ingestion” across hundreds of sources to pull content referencing Swift, her album, and associated narratives. The posts were then grouped based on the theme of the discussion.
But the report itself has issues, Maddox points out. There is no detailed methodology, for one; very few details about how the sample size was collected; and not much information on what statistical tests were conducted. There is no breakdown of posts and users — how many came from 4chan versus X, for example, or sample posts. There are no research questions listed that Gudea sought to investigate, with the company instead telling Rolling Stone that the report was prompted by a “gut feeling” from someone on staff. The report, and by extension the news coverage of it, was thin on details and demonstrable evidence. The Rolling Stone piece also clearly hit a nerve with how it characterized the backlash to the album, describing accusations of racism or fascism as “ridiculous” and “bizarre” and perhaps putting too much stock in a surface level analysis.
“The speed at which we tackle viral events is actually pretty horrific and unsustainable.”
If Taylor Swift was actually involved, Maddox jokes, she would have done a better job. The report is neither a slam dunk for Swift superfans nor a smear campaign against real, human critics — it is somewhere in between, pointing to important findings that were communicated sloppily. It requires nuance, qualifications, and further investigation; in other words, the opposite of the immediacy and virality we chase online.
“The speed at which we tackle viral events is actually pretty horrific and unsustainable, I think for our mental health and for our just general sense of being in a culture,” Maddox says. Social platforms have incentivized scale and speed over anything else, and content creators and influencers respond to that: They swarm conversations as they emerge in real time, flocking to wherever the action is and then leaving the topic behind when there’s something new to talk about. Bad information gets passed around like a game of telephone, distorting and watering down the original reporting. A user might make 10 videos about Taylor Swift one day and then move on the next day when reach has flatlined. In other words, we all start to act a bit like bots.
