An Army of Paid Creators Is Carpeting the Web With Political Content; The New York Times, September 22, 2026

Ken Bensinger and Stuart A. Thompson, The New York Times ; An Army of Paid Creators Is Carpeting the Web With Political Content

Unlike celebrity influencers with large followings, these creators produce a blizzard of videos for a fraction of the cost of traditional online campaigns and, in the process, shift public conversation.

"Judging from his TikTok feed, Drew was struggling to get by as a young man living near Dallas. Grocery bills were skyrocketing, he said, and he was looking for thrift stores to help keep costs down.

In reality, according to his LinkedIn profile, Drew was a man from Utah named Alex Forrester, who said he was now in Florida. “All of it was paid for,” he said in a video posted in late June, which was later deleted. “I don’t even live in Texas,” adding an expletive.

Mr. Forrester, who did not respond to requests for comment, is one of more than 100 content creators identified by The New York Times who in recent months have been paid as much as $30 per post by a progressive group to create videos about affordability for social media.

Similar campaigns this year have paid ordinary people to promote a Republican candidate for Los Angeles mayor, to oppose a regulatory bill pushed by the crypto industry and to call for tighter regulation of artificial intelligence. Early this month, an unidentified nonprofit group offered up to $1,500 for videos on TikTok, YouTube and Instagram that support “mail voting working correctly.”...

Functioning more like birdshot than a single bullet, these high-volume social media campaigns represent the new vanguard of modern political influence, saturating the internet with a topic until it is all but unavoidable. That can help game social media network algorithms so that they treat coordinated content as organic, spreading the message even wider. Built from dozens or hundreds of posts from accounts you’ve never heard of, they amount to an echo chamber on a budget.

“This is digital astroturfing, plain and simple,” said Samuel Woolley, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh who studies how new technologies can be used to manipulate public opinion on the web. “The more people see an idea online, the more inured to it they become and the more commonplace and acceptable it becomes.”"

Why there’s so much disinformation out there now, and how you can combat it; WTOP, October 12, 2024

John Domen, WTOP;  Why there’s so much disinformation out there now, and how you can combat it

"Most people, regardless of their political leaning, will acknowledge social media has become especially riddled with things that just aren’t true, especially in the world of politics where allegations follow candidates from all parties. So the supposed eyewitness coming to you from a disaster zone, or the supposed political insider, should probably be treated with some skepticism.

“When you see content that’s particularly disturbing or makes you very angry, a thing to keep in mind there is maybe making you angry was the point,” said Buntain. “This may not necessarily be legitimate content. It might be. It’s certainly plausible that it might be.”

“But when you start to see content that makes you angry, that tends to decrease your ability to do other things or think rationally about some of this content. Then you start to amplify it. Then you start to engage with it,” he added.

Triggering that response is often the real goal of social media algorithms. But if someone you know has been fooled, how do you convince them of that?

Because, as the saying goes, it can be harder to convince someone they’ve been fooled than it is to actually fool someone. But in some cases, at least deep down, truth might not be the real reason they’re re-sharing content that’s made up.

“They’re sharing it because it had some emotional resonance with them,” said Buntain. “And by just telling them that they … shared bad content, you’re sort of minimizing or ignoring the sort of emotional aspect that got them there, and then that’s not a good recipe for civil engagement around a particular topic.”"

How They Did It: Sandy Hook Families Savor Long-Awaited Legal Wins; The New York Times, February 20, 2022

Elizabeth Williamson, The New York Times; How They Did It: Sandy Hook Families Savor Long-Awaited Legal Wins

After early defeats in Congress, relatives of those lost in the 2012 shooting fought on, besting a renowned gun maker and an infamous conspiracy theorist.

"Mr. Pozner, the father of Noah Pozner, the youngest Sandy Hook victim, is a technology consultant who understood the online conspiracy world, and how social media algorithms hasten the spread of harmful content. He has devoted his life since the shooting to battling conspiracy theorists and the social platforms that enable them. His nonprofit, the HONR Network, has succeeded in getting hundreds of thousands of pieces of harmful content removed from Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and other platforms, and persuaded hosting companies to take down entire websites devoted to denying the shooting. Mr. Pozner’s efforts have made him a target. He has moved nearly a dozen times after hoaxers, his moniker for the Sandy Hook deniers, posted his address online. In 2017 a Florida woman, Lucy Richards, was jailed for threatening Mr. Pozner’s life.

Mr. Jones has repeatedly maligned Mr. Pozner and Noah’s mother, Veronique De La Rosa, on Infowars. For years Mr. Jones falsely claimed an interview Ms. De La Rosa gave to CNN’s Anderson Cooper in Newtown shortly after Noah’s death was faked before a studio “green screen.” Mr. Pozner had Mr. Jones’s shows making false claims about Noah and his family removed from YouTube. In a fury, Mr. Jones showed millions of viewers addresses and phone numbers linked to Mr. Pozner.

Last week, Wisconsin’s Supreme Court affirmed Mr. Pozner’s 2019 victory in a separate defamation lawsuit against James Fetzer, another conspiracy theorist who edited a 400-page book titled “Nobody Died at Sandy Hook.” The Wisconsin court dismissed Mr. Fetzer’s appeal on Wednesday."