White supremacist Nick Fuentes doesn’t seem to mind benefitting from bot farms in Pakistan, India and Nigeria promoting his content, The Post has learned.
A new analysis of the holocaust-denying firebrand’s Tweets shows they are boosted online by a foreign army of bots, mostly originating in countries which want to destabilize the US, according to an investigation.
Fuentes’ sudden apparent surge in popularity over the last year is faked based on “algorithmic amplification” powered by bot farms, according to Network Contagion Research Institute, a nonprofit that studies extremism on the internet.
They point to how Fuentes appears to outperform X owner Elon Musk, even though he has a fraction of Musk’s 239 million followers, with just 1.1 million.
“It is not organic. It is coordinated amplification and it is how a fringe figure gains the appearance of national relevance,” a senior NCRI researcher told The Post.
The exposure of this was made possible by X’s new location tool which shows where every active account is based, revealing most of Fuentes following to be in Africa and Asia, despite his commentary centering around the US.
Fuentes, 27, is a Holocaust denier, who recently described “Zionist Jews” as enemies of the conservative movement in an appearance on Tucker Carlson Network in October. He did not respond to The Post’s request for comment Monday.
Fuentes’ online profile jumped exponentially after the assassination of Turning Point founder Charlie Kirk in September, the report says.
Media outlets replaced grainy screenshots of Fuentes with studio prints, making the activist look like “someone with national momentum,” according to the report, which added he was actually backed by a mixture of anonymous extremists and “foreign amplifiers” who used him as a vehicle to spread anti-American rhetoric.
“Fuentes did not have a massive following,” said the researcher. “What he had was manipulated engagement. The failure came when media outlets treated that distortion as real and elevated him as if he represented a major force. They gave prominence to a signal they never verified.”
The NCRI report is gaining momentum in the online tech community where one expert says that Fuentes is effectively leading a bot army to go after President Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again movement.
“Everything in this report matches well-known destabilization tactics used by foreign actors: identify a counter-elite, amplify them artificially and weaponize real grievances into a feedback loop that fractures the target movement from within,” said DataRepublican, an anonymous data scientist who ferrets out alleged corruption and waste within the US government.
“And now this playbook is being applied to MAGA itself. People have speculated about foreign influence with Fuentes for a while, but X’s location feature finally provided the empirical signal that exposed this operation.”
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: nypost.com
