These Kamala Harris critics do not exist

In which a low-effort spam network floods the replies of popular X accounts with duplicate attacks on the Democratic presidential candidate

Sep 28, 2024

collage of 21 similarly worded replies containing all of "Kamala", "every life", and "sacred" — another day, another barrage of political spam

The 2024 U.S. presidential election is just over a month away, and it should come as no surprise to anyone that various attempts at influencing the contest via social media manipulation are underway. Over on social media platform X, a network of hundreds of recently-created inauthentic accounts has been bombarding the reply sections of popular posts with repetitively worded attacks on Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris. The spammy accounts in question also occasionally amplify various popular right-wing figures, and make use of both stolen and artificially generated images as profile photos.

graph of monthly account creation volume for the 545 accounts in the spam network — all of the accounts in the network were created within the last year

This reply spam network consists at least 545 X accounts, created between January and September 2024, mostly during the latter portion of that period. Each account has posted no more than 600 times as of September 27th, 2024, and most have only a handful of followers (many of which appear to be fake). The accounts in question were found by searching for replies containing both “Kamala” and “every life”, and then filtering to replies that were duplicated in the dataset at least 10 times in order to weed out false positives.

screenshots of the followers of three of the spam accounts — when you’re a spam account with nothing to say, real followers can be hard to come by

Almost all of the content posted by this spam network is replies: 88114 of 88364 posts, or 99.7%. Most of these replies are to large accounts that support Kamala Harris, including the official @KamalaHQ X account. These replies are extremely repetitive, with dozens of accounts frequently replying to different posts with the same comment. The network’s recent replies are mostly attacks on Harris, such as “Kamala believes it’s okay to end the life of a baby, but every life is sacred”, which was posted verbatim 59 times by 57 distinct spam accounts. Previous repetitive replies include pro-Trump and anti-Biden comments, mixed with apolitical sports-related chatter.

table of replies most frequently repeated by the network — nothing to see here, just a bunch of accounts replying with the exact same text over and over and over

The activity of this spam network ramped up over time as additional accounts came into service, with a significant increase in volume in mid-June. Content posted at the time of this increase is largely focused on attacking Joe Biden, who was at that point still the presumptive Democratic nominee for the U.S. presidency. Some of the network’s posts also target Senate and House races, expressing spammy support for Republican candidates and criticizing Democrats.

graph of daily reply volume for the network — at its busiest points, the network posted over 2500 times per day

In addition to the reply spam, the accounts in the network also repost content, albeit infrequently. The material reposted by the network is mostly from major right-wing influencers, with large meme pages thrown into the mix as well. The five accounts most frequently amplified are Elon Musk (@elonmusk), Libs of Tiktok (@libsoftiktok), Amazing Nature (@AMAZINGNATURE), Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11), and Cat Turd (@catturd2).

table of accounts most frequently reposted by the network — we don’t always share posts, but when we do we prefer right-wing propaganda

The accounts in the network largely use drawings, cartoons, and logos as their profile images, but there are a few exceptions that serve to underscore the inauthenticity of the whole effort. A handful of the accounts use AI-generated faces as avatars, specifically StyleGAN-generated face images similar to those served by thispersondoesnotexist.com.

none of these people exist, but that doesn’t stop them from spamming replies

Some of the spam accounts use genuine photos of real people as avatars. Predictably, these photographs are plagiarized, usually from random people’s social media feeds or the staff directories of random business websites. (Many of of the stolen photos include children; those reverse image searches are therefore excluded from the collage below.) The stolen images were easily identified using Google reverse image search; TinEye was strangely ineffective here.