Analysis has found that a coordinated online attack sought to align Taylor Swift and her latest album, The Life of a Showgirl, with Nazi and rightwing imagery and values, from accounts feigning leftist critique and designed to encourage outrage.
The AI-driven behavioural intelligence platform Gudea produced a report examining more than 24,000 posts and 18,000 accounts across 14 social media platforms between 4 October, the day of the album’s release, and 18 October. These posts accused Swift of sowing dogwhistle references in her lyrics and alleged that a lightning bolt-style necklace from her merchandise line – a reference to the album track Opalite – resembled SS insignia.
The report concluded that 3.77% of accounts drove 28% of discussion of Swift in the period, chiefly conspiracy theories that also made allegations about her supposed ties to the Maga movement and criticisms framing her engagement to American football player Travis Kelce as “trad” or conservative. In a spike that took place between 6 and 7 October, 35% of posts in the dataset came from bot-like accounts.
Gudea said that while they didn’t uncover the identity of those responsible, they found “a significant user overlap between accounts pushing the Swift ‘Nazi’ narrative and those active in a separate astroturf campaign attacking Blake Lively”, the actor involved in an ongoing sexual harassment lawsuit against actor and director Justin Baldoni – and a once close friend of Swift’s.
The data, said Gudea, “reveals a cross-event amplification network, one that disproportionately influences multiple celebrity-driven controversies and injects misinformation into otherwise organic conversations”.
The allegations about Swift were initially disseminated on more niche online spaces such as 4chan and then migrated to mainstream social media apps – and were then unwittingly spread by the public and algorithms.
“The false narrative that Taylor Swift was using Nazi symbolism did not remain confined to fringe conspiratorial spaces; it successfully pulled typical users into comparisons between Swift and Kanye West,” the researchers wrote. “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.”
Even getting the public to disagree with the allegations constituted a success for the people behind the attack, Gudea founder and CEO Keith Presley told Rolling Stone. “That’s part of the goal for these types of narratives, for whoever is pushing them. Especially with these inflammatory ones – that’s going to get rewarded by the algorithm. You’ll see the influencers jump on first, because it’s going to get them clicks.”
Nonetheless, some critics did question some of the values apparently on show in The Life of a Showgirl, pointing out that the song Cancelled! – in which Swift welcomes social pariahs into her world, having experienced widespread public backlash herself in 2015 – could happily be sung by any bad actor who has experienced consequences as a result of harmful behaviour.
This Friday sees the release of the first two episodes of The End of an Era, a six-part Disney+ docu-series going behind the scenes of Swift’s blockbuster Eras tour, which ran from spring 2023 to December 2024.
