Tipsheet

It Turns Out Kamala HQ Is Manipulating Community Notes

Rebecca Downs
Rebecca Downs  |  October 31, 2024 3:45 PM

We’ve been covering throughout this 2024 campaign cycle how the Biden HQ X account, now the Kamala HQ account, has been lying and posting misleading claims about former and potentially future President Donald Trump. They had a particularly bogus response following President Joe Biden's remarks referring to Trump supporters as "garbage," and, as Leah covered earlier on Thursday, they took Trump's comments on women completely out of context. Yet they seem to be getting away with it without Community Notes stepping in. It looks like we now know why that is.

On Wednesday, part of an investigative report from The Federalist into the Harris-Walz campaign and their social media tactics was released, with Trending Politics' Collin Rugg also highlighting specific examples over X. 

When it comes to Community Notes manipulations, the likely culprit is through the use of a Discord server.

As the report also mentions:

However, throughout this campaign Harris-Walz official accounts have been remarkable conduits for disinformation and have regularly provided dishonest presentations of the Trump-Vance campaign. The Harris campaign’s X accounts have been so bad that even CNN fact checker Daniel Dale, who has been very harsh on Trump for several years, wrote an entire column highlighting the errors and dishonesty.

Despite this, virtually none of the false and misleading tweets from Kamala Harris’ campaign have Community Notes appended to them. One likely explanation for this discrepancy is that the Harris campaign is directing volunteers on its Discord server to vote down Community Notes even when those notes accurately say the campaign is being deceptive.

In the example below, after a @KamalaHQ tweet claimed Trump referred to Americans who don’t support him as “dangerous people,” Timothy Durigan, an employee of the Democratic National Committee, urges campaign volunteers to vote down a Community Note that accurately pointed out the Kamala campaign was taking Trump’s remark out of context. Trump was actually speaking about those in the American government responsible for leaking information related to Israel’s war plans[.]

...

In the “twitter-community-notes” channel found on the Harris-Walz Discord, paid Democrat staffers are also writing dubious Community Notes on X to undermine GOP and Trump messaging. They then encourage volunteers to rate them positively.

Unsurprisingly, these notes are often filled with half-truths, misleading information, or lies, such as explaining how Joe Biden’s son’s brain tumor must have been due to his service in Iraq.

The Harris-Walz server even has a “Twitter (X) Community Notes Training” module, which describes how users can quickly bump up their Community Notes “Rating Impact,” which allows them to write their own Community Notes with a high enough status. They also describe “problems” with Community Notes, such as Joe Biden being tagged in “inaccurate Community Notes,” and how users can rate them negatively.

Since X’s Community Notes upvoting system is designed to mitigate political bias far better than Reddit’s, the Harris-Walz campaign’s attempt to manipulate Community Notes on X hasn’t been as successful.

One Harris-Walz Discord user lengthily expressed his frustrations at the bias mitigation system used by Community Notes (CNs), which was implemented to prevent user manipulation[.]

...

While their attempts to abuse Community Notes on X were largely ineffective, it is still a gross violation of X’s Terms of Service, which prohibits artificially amplifying information.

There are plenty of screenshots of examples included in the article, as well as in the excerpt, and as shared by Rugg.

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In addition to Community Notes, there's also the KamalaHQLies account looking to set the record straight in replies for any of the Kamala HQ posts. Elon Musk has also taken note and said he plans to investigate.

Kamala HQ is hardly the only problematic account in support of the Harris-Walz ticket. Our sister site of Twitchy has been covering plenty of examples of how shady and untrustworthy the "Kamala's Wins" account is for months as well. 

That a campaign supposedly built around "joy" and "hope," a tactic actually used by the Nazis, is finding itself increasingly desperate and feeling the need to manipulate Community Notes is hardly a shocking move. Yet it's Harris and Walz, as well as other top Democrats, who continue to insist that Trump supporters are the Nazis.

The momentum still looks to be with Trump, and with the election just days away, Harris not doing what she needed to do with her "closing argument speech" and Biden taking away from that speech by referring to Trump supporters as "garbage," we'll see who comes out on top. It might not even be as close as the polls are predicting it to be.