For years, many have speculated that Democrat political candidates may be filling social media with fake posts to deceive the public and make their campaigns and causes seem more popular than they are. These claims have often been dismissed, citing that Democrat voters are already more likely to be on the internet compared to their not-as-tech-savvy Republican counterparts. This would suggest that the constant flood of left-leaning content on websites such as Reddit was merely a reflection of the userbase. However, many people simply couldn’t shake the feeling that something was just off, especially in the run up to major elections. Despite my fervent belief that something was amiss, I never had any direct proof that Democrats were actively manipulating social media.

That all changed two weeks ago, when X user @jessiprincey replied to one of my posts with a screenshot from a Discord server, seemingly related to the Harris-Walz campaign:

I immediately messaged Jess, and soon received a link to the Discord server where this operation was taking place. What I’d find there went far beyond algorithmic manipulation. I discovered massive “astroturfing” campaigns operating across multiple platforms. “Astroturfing” is a political and marketing term that describes creating swarms of coordinated and/or paid messages and posts to deceptively create the illusion of support from ordinary people. Essentially, “astroturfing” is the opposite of grassroots support.

In this case, there is a team of volunteers who spam social media with posts that specifically promote Kamala. They then have other users pretend to be random individuals who just happened across the post and decided to comment. It’s no different than a shady company paying a team to write a bunch of fake Amazon reviews about their product to make it appear to be a better and more popular product than it is.

On Amazon, that might result in a product getting more sales. In a U.S. election, it could mean that the falsely advertised candidate receives more votes. This behavior is not only incredibly dishonest, but in many cases, it directly violates the Terms of Service they’ve agreed to by operating on certain social media platforms.

In part one of a three-part series, we’re going to look at how the Harris-Walz campaign has manipulated the popular website Reddit, one of the top social media sites with 500 million users, to publish campaign propaganda.

Astroturfing on Reddit

Reddit is broken into thousands of message boards on discrete topics, known as “subreddits.” The Politics subreddit and several others are being actively targeted by the Harris-Walz campaign, with notable success. Since the Reddit astroturfing operation started, it has rapidly developed an organizational structure — complete with roles for team members, spreadsheets for tracking their analytics, and “Key Messaging” to stick to when making a social media post.

I found that 126 of the top 1,000 posts in the past month on r/Politics were posted by official Harris-Walz campaign volunteers. Owning one out of every eight of all top posts in r/Politics is not an easy feat, and it doesn’t just happen. Here’s how they achieved it.

Every weekday morning, Harris for President staffers like Gabrielle Lynn post the “Daily Messaging Guidance” to the server’s Reddit channel. It usually consists of articles and data that the Harris-Walz campaign wants to boost, as well as “key messaging” that their Reddit volunteers should stick to.

On Gabrielle Lynn’s profile, you’ll find a Staff icon (the blue D), which indicates that she is a paid Democrat staffer. In this case, Gabrielle is a Harris for President staffer.

The links compiled by official Harris-Walz staffers, along with other articles submitted by volunteers, are added to a Google Spreadsheet called “Reddit Organizing.”

Kamala’s “Lead Posters” (people who have demonstrated a “cultural” knowledge of Reddit) then choose which links will resonate best with different Reddit communities. For instance, a link about “how Project 2025 impacts reproductive health” will be directed towards communities with young women as their primary user base, whereas news about Kamala’s Fox News interview “winning over swing state voters” gets directed to Reddit’s Democrat communities, and possibly to people living in swing states.

Harris-Walz campaign volunteers have created a database of more than 100 subreddits — each containing detailed information on what kind of content they permit, what topics perform the best, and any specific notes about each community, such as how much “karma” or cumulative upvotes one needs to post in each subreddit.

After their links have been collected and categorized, volunteer “Posters” will take a handful of the links provided and post them to their assigned subreddits. Kamala’s posters, however, don’t simply spam links haphazardly. They use a calculated, sequential post timing metric to avoid Reddit’s built-in spam filters. Harris-Walz campaign volunteers often discuss their ban-avoidance tactics in their Discord server, while continuing to spam Reddit with their collected links.

Once the users make their Reddit posts, they return to the spreadsheet and update it with a link to their brand-new post.

And why do they collect their post links?

They collect their Reddit links so Kamala’s volunteers can flood the post with likes and comments, thus making them appear more active. This, in turn, triggers the algorithm to make the post appear in more user timelines. Reddit’s post activity algorithm is extremely simple, and can easily be abused, which is known on Reddit as “brigading.”

How Effective is This?

While the Harris-Walz Discord server was created many months ago, the spreadsheet to track their vote manipulation on Reddit was only implemented on Oct. 4.

Over the course of 15 days, this group of volunteers, directed by official Harris-Walz campaign staff, was able to make 2,551 posts to Reddit. So far, they have received more than 5.7 million upvotes and 418,000 comments on those posts, according to their own data:

Currently, they’re posting approximately 120 unique links to Reddit per day.

However, Kamala’s volunteer data wasn’t enough for me. I wanted to know just how effective this campaign has been. So, I exported their spreadsheet and got to work.

Using their oh-so cleverly named “Please Upvote These!” spreadsheet, I filtered the information to find posts exclusively made by official Harris-Walz campaign volunteers. I found 1,728 posts created by 67 unique Harris-Walz campaign volunteers since Oct. 4, many of which received a LOT of traction in a very short time span.

I tagged each of their usernames with a “Kamala Harris Volunteer” label using a browser extension called Reddit Enhancement Suite, and went to their targeted subreddits to determine exactly how successful they’d been.

I found their primary target to be r/Politics, the largest community on Reddit for discussing U.S. politics with more than 8 million members. I sorted the top 1,000 posts of the past month, and what I discovered shocked me.

Of the top 1,000 posts on r/Politics, 126 were written by a user bearing the mark “Kamala Harris Volunteer.”

This means 12.5 percent of the most upvoted content on r/Politics came directly from volunteers of the Harris-Walz campaign.

Remember, this operation has only picked up steam in the last two weeks. On Oct. 17, eight of the 30 hottest posts on r/Politics were created by Harris-Walz campaign volunteers. That’s over 25 percent.

On Oct. 20, 13 of the 100 newest posts were created by Harris-Walz campaign volunteers.

Beyond r/Politics, they also target swing state subreddits, which tend to be a lot smaller in number and far less strictly moderated. They created a collection of swing state subreddits, including communities dedicated to their towns and cities, which streamlines the process of targeting them with Harris-Walz supplied messaging.

Because these communities are small, it’s a lot easier to get their posts to rank. In the week between Oct. 13 and the 20, 10 percent (39 of 400 posts) of top posts in their swing state collection were created by Harris-Walz volunteers, many of whom aren’t even from a swing state.

It’s safe to say that the Harris-Walz astroturfing operation has fundamentally compromised the authenticity of political discussions on Reddit. Kamala is actively ruining the internet by making her campaign look far more popular than it is in reality.

The actions, while seemingly not illegal, directly violate Reddit’s Terms of Service. The volunteers of the Harris-Walz campaign are using multiple accounts to manipulate votes …

and solicit votes from others …

in a group formed to coordinate voting:

These are all direct violations of Reddit’s content policy, which explicitly forbids the types of vote manipulation that is encouraged on the Harris-Walz volunteer Discord server.

Why is This So Effective?

For those unfamiliar with Reddit, the site tends to be very left-leaning, largely due to the biases of activist Reddit moderators. Here’s a recent example:

The following post was made by a Democrat redditor to r/Texas. The call for Democrats specifically to get out and vote was met with heaps of praise and showered with upvotes.

However, when the same text was posted but with “Democrat” and “Kamala” replaced with “Republican” and “Trump,” the post was deleted and the user banned from r/Texas.

It’s unknown if Reddit is aware of the policy violations being performed by the Harris-Walz campaign. While it’s possible that their accounts will be banned when their actions come to light, it is also entirely possible that Reddit is giving the Harris-Walz campaign free rein to violate the rules. In 2018, Reddit’s CEO Steve Huffman plainly stated in an interview with The New Yorker:

I’m confident that Reddit could sway elections. We wouldn’t do it, of course. And I don’t know how many times we could get away with it. But, if we really wanted to, I’m sure Reddit could have swayed at least this election, this once.