When Taylor Swift dropped The Life of a Showgirl, she was hit with inflammatory accusations online — which new research is showing was a coordinated attack.
Back in October, social media posts accused Swift, 35, of endorsing MAGA, trad-wife ideology and white supremacy. The attacks appeared to focus on word choices from her latest album (the word “savage” on “Eldest Daughter” was deemed racist) and symbols (a necklace listed on her website drew comparisons to Nazis because of the lighting bolt charms bearing resemblance to the party’s bolt symbol.)
Swifties went on to defend their idol, engaging with the theories via social media.
GUDEA — a behavioral intelligence startup that tracks claims such as these when they go viral online — examined more than 24,000 posts and 18,000 accounts across 14 digital platforms from October 4 to October 18.
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The group is now reporting that 3.77 percent of accounts drove 28 percent of the conversation around Swift and The Life of a Showgirl in that time frame — pointing to a cluster of accounts that spread inflammatory content about Swift. (Rolling Stone was the first to share the news on Wednesday, December 10.)
The research showed that the content often initially appeared on forums like 4chan or KiwiFarms before making its way over to more mainstream social media platforms, where they were sustained by people challenging them.
“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.”
GUDEA’s head of customer success, Georgia Paul, claimed she suggested that the group investigate the online conversation surrounding Swift after having a “gut feeling” that there was something going on. Paul and her coworkers confirmed this idea and identified two spikes in misleading activity related to Swift.
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The first occurred on October 6 and 7, with approximately 35 percent of the posts in GUDEA’s data set generated by accounts that appeared to be bots. The second, which happened over October 13 and 14 (after Swift released a merch collection with the aforementioned necklace), had about 40 percent of posts shared by “inauthentic accounts and conspiracist content” that accounted for 73.9 percent of the conversation.
“The internet is fake,” Keith Presley, GUDEA’s founder and CEO, partially joked, noting that 50 percent of the internet is made up of bots. “This is something that we’ve seen escalate on our corporate side — this type of espionage, or working to damage someone’s reputation.”
Presley and his team do not know the identity of the individual or group behind the attack, but did discover “a significant user overlap between accounts pushing the Swift ‘Nazi’ narrative and those active in a separate astroturf campaign attacking Blake Lively.”
The reference to Lively, 38, relates to the actress’ ongoing legal battle with her It Ends With Us costar and director Justin Baldoni, in which she alleged that his “plan went well beyond standard crisis PR.” In Lively’s 2024 lawsuit, she alleged that a group had proposed a “a practice known as ‘astroturfing,’ which has been defined as ‘the practice of publishing opinions or comments on the internet, in the media, etc. that appear to come from ordinary members of the public but actually come from a particular company or political group.’” (After Lively’s lawsuit accusing Baldoni of sexual harassment, he denied the allegations and fired back his own lawsuit in January. Baldoni’s suit was dismissed in June. Lively and Baldoni’s trial has been postponed until May 2026.)
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GUDEA researchers wrote that the data “reveals a cross-event amplification network, one that disproportionately influences multiple celebrity-driven controversies and injects misinformation into otherwise organic conversations.”
In Presley’s perspective, the networks and strategies demonstrate a “sophistication” in potentially damaging reputations via social media. Rolling Stone noted that Swift’s attacks may be a test-run before these accounts pursue other avenues in the future.
“When we put our doomsday hat on, I think we can see that reality,” Paul said, before speculating “that there might be other nefarious actors, not U.S.-based, who have reasons to see, ‘If I can move the fan base for Taylor Swift — an icon who is this political figure, in a way — does that mean I can do it in other places?’”
It’s unclear what the intention of the person or persons behind the accounts may stand to gain by organizing these attacks — but they succeeded in having users address the claims.
“That’s part of the goal for these types of narratives, for whoever is pushing them,” Presley said. “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.”
Us Weekly reached out to Swift for comment.