No Country for Grumpy Old Men

As if Talarico’s campaign isn’t already having a bad day, a New York Times report released Sunday says dozens of TikTok accounts were paid $4 per 1,000 views to post positive clips about him. The company behind the payments is Frontier Media. Naturally his campaign says it had nothing to do with it. The money Frontier Media used to pay for pro-Talarico social content had to come from somewhere. These paid “clippers” weren’t a tiny side effort. They accounted for nearly a quarter of the Talarico-related videos the Times looked at in a 24-hour window. The money’s source is still unclear and Frontier Media has no visible FEC filings. The campaign’s denial is noted, but the volume of paid content is not. Follow the money is the obvious course of action. Between today’s blockbuster mental health facility claims and now this NYT article on paid support for Talarico, it’s unthinkable that his campaign survives the week let alone a debate or election. Organic support is one thing. A network of accounts getting paid by the view to flood the platform with positive clips is another. Voters can tell the difference. The appearance of a spontaneous online army collapses once the payments are documented. That’s what the Times just did. It should be mentioned that a man in the U.S. just got sentenced to jail for artificially creating consumption of his AI songs on streaming services. There should be similar penalties for artificially creating support for a political candidate, without disclosing it, on social media. The fraud is for profit. In the streaming case financially, in the Talarico case politically and also financially. Both are clearly immoral and should be criminal.