Bots Framed Taylor Swift As A Nazi, But That Doesn’t Mean Critiques Weren’t Justified
The latest Taylor Swift plot twist isn’t a new rumour or an Easter egg unpacked — it’s data. A new report from behavioural intelligence company Gudea found that accusations of Swift peppering Nazi symbolism in her latest album, The Life of a Showgirl, was inflamed by tens of thousands of bots, amplifying the narrative from “fringe conspiratorial spaces” to mainstream discourse.
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But for people of colour who took issue with Showgirl, do the findings even matter?
First: what Gudea actually found
When The Life Of A Showgirl landed, the usual Easter-egg hunt quickly spiralled into claims Swift was implicitly endorsing MAGA, trad-wife gender roles and white supremacy via “dogwhistle” symbolism, including a lightning-bolt necklace tied to Nazi imagery.
Gudea, a behavioural intelligence company, pulled more than 24,000 posts and 18,000 accounts across 14 platforms between October 4 and 18, and found just 3.77 per cent of accounts drove 28 per cent of the conversation — a tiny cluster disproportionately responsible for the most inflammatory content about Nazi allusions, secret MAGA ties and trad framing of her relationship with Travis Kelce.
As first reported by Rolling Stone, those narratives often started in places like 4chan and KiwiFarms before showing up on mainstream platforms, where normal users — including Swifties trying to debunk them — reacted, stitched and dunked, which only boosted their reach in the algorithm.
As Gudea’s report put it, the false Nazi-symbolism story “successfully pulled typical users into comparisons between Swift and Kanye West”, showing how a strategically seeded lie can morph into widespread discourse even when most people don’t buy the original claim.
Gudea’s co-founder and CEO Keith Presley told PEDESTRIAN.TV that what caught their eye wasn’t Swift herself but the pattern or accusations.
“Gudea continuously monitors narrative spikes across cultural, political, and commercial domains, and we flag situations where posting velocity, account behavior, or narrative structure deviates from what we would expect in a normal conversation,” he said.
“In this case, we detected an unusually fast surge of newly active or low-history accounts pushing highly similar claims about Nazi symbolism. That behavioural anomaly (not the celebrity involved) is what triggered a deeper investigation.”
He stressed that “this report was not commissioned by Taylor Swift, her team, Rolling Stone, or any outside party”, and was instead part of Gudea’s broader work on “how coordinated activity can trigger large-scale authentic engagement, even when most users reject or mock the original falsehood”. Their analysis found a “small cohort of non-typical accounts” seeded the narrative before it migrated into mainstream Swift discourse, a pattern they say appears in “many influence campaigns targeting public figures”.
Gudea doesn’t know who was behind the coordinated effort, but their work shows significant user overlap between accounts pushing the Swift Nazi narrative and those that previously posted negatively about Blake Lively while she was in her own alleged smear campaign during the It Ends With Us coverage. Gudea — has framed that overlap as a “cross-event amplification network” — a cluster of accounts that keeps showing up across different celebrity controversies, injecting misinformation into conversations that would otherwise be organic.
Presley half-joked to Rolling Stone that “the internet is fake”, pointing out that roughly half of online activity is bots, and said this kind of “espionage” aimed at damaging reputations is escalating.
Gudea told P.TV that their broader concern is that coordinated actors are increasingly “exploit[ing] celebrity flashpoints to drive attention, shape frames, or inject political narratives”, with Swift’s case just one example of how “small-scale manipulation can escalate into large-scale cultural conversation once it provokes authentic users to respond”.
As a Swiftie, this didn’t feel like “case closed”
Reading all of this as a fan — I literally had Swift sitting at the top of my Spotify Wrapped — it didn’t feel like, “Okay, pack it up, racism conversation over”. In fact, as someone who was lucky enough to have listened to the album before its official release, the racial and political weirdness in the album jumped out before the bots named it mainstream, and that’s important to name.
From the heavy use of African-American Vernacular English (AAVE), and describing Kelce’s exes as “bad bitches” and “savage”, the racial and political weirdness was hard to miss. In fact, the comparisons to Kelce’s exes in general were weird and positioned Taylor as this superior woman. The lack of awareness on Taylor’s part was jarring.
As Licensed therapist and TikToker Lee Tepper said in their video, “I feel like this is a [Rolling Stone] piece that was written to erase and absolve the critiques that were actually legit and maybe constructive.”
Tepper’s point is that it “doesn’t mean that Taylor Swift is a Nazi, but it also doesn’t mean that there is no significance here” when a white woman leans into very traditional marriage and fertility imagery in a political moment defined by hard-right backlash.
Writer and longtime Swiftie Sunny Adcock — whose Life Of A Showgirl piece laid out the racial undertones of the article — told P.TV that her first reaction to the Gudea study was pure exhaustion.
“My first response was fatigue,” she said to P.TV. “And that has been a recurrent theme in the way that I have participated in Taylor Swift discourse in the last year, but particularly post-Life of a Showgirl, despite being a Swiftie and somebody who wrote extensively about Life of a Showgirl.”
Sunny pointed out that some of the Swift points Gudea flagged as being disproportionately pushed by non‑typical, bot‑like accounts — posts framing The Life Of A Showgirl as secretly aligned with MAGA, trad‑wife values and even white supremacy via Nazi‑coded imagery — were sitting right next to critiques she and other fans had already made about the album’s fixation on whiteness and permanent victimhood.
“Some of the arguments they were suggesting were made up by bots were arguments that I raised as a real human being,” she said.
Then came scepticism. Sunny realised that “some of the arguments they were suggesting were made up by bots were arguments that I raised as a real human being”, with the notable exception of the necklace discourse she never saw in her circles.
She’s the first to say “it is plausible that there are bots online pushing anonymous groups’ agendas”, but she worries that labelling the whole thing a smear campaign is “beneficial for Taylor” in a very familiar way.
“I honestly kind of felt like this was beneficial for Taylor to have this come out,” she explained, noting that the album was a commercial juggernaut but “culturally had very little impact” and “wasn’t necessarily universally loved by Swifties”.
For Sunny, this moment almost feels tailor-made for the persona Swift has leaned on for years. “Having something like this come out cements the idea that like, ‘Oh, maybe this backlash was manufactured. Maybe this is once again an example where Taylor Swift was the victim and the underdog’, which is the place in which she thrives,” she said.
“I just thought she must be thrilled… ‘Guys, it’s not real. See? This was again an attack on me as a woman, and didn’t come from any place of substance. I’m once again the victim.’”
That sits alongside Sunny’s broader critique of Swift’s image: someone Forbes recently named one of “the most powerful women in the world”, who still tells stories where she’s under siege and people “want her to go away”, even as she dominates charts, tours and is a literal billionaire. That tension — between very real sexism and enormous white, capitalist power — is where the conversation about “whiteness” actually lives.
The album’s recurring themes — clinging to victimhood while being the most successful woman in the world, presenting herself as a pure, virtuous ‘everyday girl’, embodying a certain American Dream — are all symptoms of whiteness.
“These narratives that she peddles wouldn’t exist without whiteness and are upheld by whiteness,” Sunny said, explaining that whiteness here is “a system that protects and maintains white superiority and embeds that within culture”. Importantly, she adds, “that’s not to conflate being white with whiteness – you can be a person of colour and uphold whiteness”.
In other words, whiteness is about the structures and stories that prioritise white comfort, innocence and power — not just the colour of someone’s skin.
Showgirl’s racial red flags were there from day one
Long before any report dropped, fans were dissecting Showgirl’s lyrics and imagery. Sunny’s original piece, written as a mixed-race Black woman who grew up listening to Swift’s music, walks through how the album recycles certain patterns: turning a movement about eldest daughter burnout (experienced heavily by ethnic girls) into a metaphor for being a famous white woman, contrasting herself with Kelce’s mostly Black exes and leaning into Americana fantasies while the US slides further right.
“While I’m nearly certain that Swift didn’t intend to reinforce white supremacy and eugenics with the comparison, it’s particularly tone-deaf given the cultural climate we now find ourselves in,” she wrote, describing a world that’s moved from the “progressive promise” of the Lover era to a “Republican era” where “white tears and white fears” fuel Donald Trump’s regime.
It doesn’t help Swift’s case when her husband to be says it’s an “honour” to have the President at his football games and the singer herself poses in photos with MAGA podcasters, Taylor Lewan and Will Compton. These are all real, non-bot people that she has actively chosen to align herself with.
Sexism, whiteness and the machine of Taylor Swift
I want to be clear: none of this cancels out the very real misogyny Swift has faced — from Kanye interrupting her at the VMAs to years of being framed as a boy-crazy snake.
Sunny is explicit that Swift’s career “has genuinely been impacted by sexism”, and that defending her from that matters. But she also says that her mega stardom is inseparable from her “relationship to whiteness… as well as her talent and her hard work”, and that many people are uncomfortable sitting with the fact you can be both privileged and harmed, both victim and participant in broader systems.
She calls Swift “one of the smartest business women we have ever seen” and “so intelligent”, arguing that we underestimate her when we pretend this is all accidental. At the same time, Sunny feels the “machine of Taylor Swift, the brand of Taylor Swift, is just so powerful and all-consuming” that there is “no space for like genuine underdogs or little guys… to offer conversation starters that might be critical”, which is why she now feels hesitant to offer further criticism despite still going to the shows and streaming the music.
Where this leaves fans, and what it says about the rest of us
From where I’m sitting, bots are objectively bad, but they are not a magic eraser. Gudea’s work matters because it shows how shockingly easy it is for a tiny group of inauthentic accounts to seed a narrative that pulls in real people, real emotions and real outlets, all for someone else’s agenda.
But as Sunny warns, there’s a real risk that this will “shut those conversations down”, with any future critique waved away as “not real” or part of some underground attack.
The conversations might have been amplified by bots, but they were being had by humans — people who care about music, culture and politics enough to sit in the messy tension between loving an artist and wanting them, and the systems around them, to do better.
“We should be able to have constructive, curious, and empathetic conversations about what her work and its messaging means for the broader culture without being accused of having a personal vendetta against Taylor Swift,” said Sunny.
If we let bad-faith actors and coordinated networks define the entire frame, we don’t just lose nuance around Taylor Swift, we make it harder to have honest conversations about race, power and the stories white women tell — on the internet and far beyond it.
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