It's the journalism police here to make an arrest! We're talking about a little bit of journalistic malpractice here today. Let's do it.

Now look, here's the thing. I will be the first one to admit to you that music journalism, in a lot of ways, differs from other schools of media and news coverage in that a lot of what you say does actually come down to preference, and what you like, and what you personally find interesting and then advocating for and celebrating those preferences. Look no further than Rolling Stone's recent rollout for Taylor Swift's latest record, The Life of a Showgirl, where they not only slapped the album with a five-out-of-five star review, but they also did a whole front-page takeover for the record as well, which... sure, you could argue, is a little bit excessive. However, I can only critique so much, as I am also the guy who literally green-screened Brat [artwork] onto my shirt when I gave that record a 10-out-of-10 review. Because there's nothing wrong with being excited about an album and showing that; it's something that I think we should encourage.

But! When your fandom for an artist drives you as a publication to run interference for that artist, as if you were a Twitter stan account, I feel like that's when we're actually crossing a line, which is why I'm so disturbed by this Rolling Stone article:

"Taylor Swift's last album sparked bizarre accusations of Nazism. It was a COORDINATED ATTACK."

I am disturbed both by the content of this article and the platform it's on because Rolling Stone is a historic, influential, and massive publication. This is not just like some teeny bopper rag, but they parasocially come to Taylor's defense in this article with bare minimum fact-checking and evidence on the claims they are making.

Now, since The Life of a Showgirl has just come out recently, I would hope that we can all pretty vividly and accurately remember the discourse surrounding the album at the time it dropped. But if you need a reminder, the bulk of discussions around this record centered around how weird, awkward, unintentionally goofy, and sometimes problematic its lyrical content was. You know, bars about Travis Kelce's dong, and all that ("Wood"). Also, Taylor actively reveling in circling herself with friends who are "CANCELLED!", which many were correct, I think, to read as being a little tone deaf. There are even a few bars on this record where Taylor brags about this dream of basically shacking up with Travis and filling a neighborhood with kids that look just like him as they start a family, obviously ("Wi$h Li$t"). This is something that many people saw as being "gentrification-coded"; personally, while I'm not crazy about this bar, I didn't necessarily read this as Taylor's intent. Though it is funny she would say this without considering how it could possibly be taken because historically, she is someone who tends to think a lot about her public image and calculates exactly how she's going to portray it and even feeds into what some might classify as maybe a bit of a mass psychosis of Taylor Swift fans seeking out Easter eggs in literally every single thing that she does.

So, while all of this was definitely happening and a factor in the broad conversation around this album, believe me when I say a bulk of the discourse around The Life of a Showgirl centered around many of the more obvious lyrical faux pas, weird consistencies, and issues of taste when it comes to certain word choices and messaging.

Still, it is important to keep account of the fact that Taylor Swift is currently one of the most famous pop stars and people on the planet, and as a result, she receives both warranted and unwarranted criticisms of all types and stripes. So it's not surprising to find that sometimes you have individuals who are taking their interpretations of certain messages, visuals, or merch a bit too far. Going down a rabbit hole, if you want to call it that. Let's take a look at these recent "Opalite" necklaces, which some actually did see as being like some white power nod, given that if you squint your eyes enough, the lightning bolts kind of look like SS symbols to some.

Maybe this sounds crazy to you — it certainly does to me — but there are people who will argue this to you until they're blue in the face and think that Taylor is crafting some secret racist message into her promo material and this album cycle. However, if you look at Taylor Swift's broad history of social statements and what we can interpret to be her politics, it seems like self-interest is more her guiding light than any deep-seated belief or ideology, which is not a sin in and of itself. I feel like this is actually how most people on the planet operate.

However, Taylor Swift is not most people, and sometimes it is tough to watch her not live up to the responsibility of her platform. For example, in recent weeks, Taylor hasn't really done much of anything to curtail the Trump administration and the White House from using her music to promote their fascist agenda. And certainly, there's been more discourse around this than the "Opalite" necklaces. And yet the focus of this article I'm talking about here is not only just on these straw-man criticisms that don't make total sense, but it also alleges the most unhinged of all these criticisms are a coordinated attack, which is a pretty bold claim when you actually think about it. A bold claim that requires evidence, digging, some level of substantiation, maybe staff writers working tirelessly to put all the pieces together and then lay it out in a very well-put-together article. But sadly, that is not what happens in this Rolling Stone piece at all.

Seemingly, all of Rolling Stone's information on this topic comes directly from a tech startup that claims to use AI to track and quantify social media discourse in different ways. Their name is GUDEA ("Joodia?" "Goodia?"). They're saying they've gone over thousands and thousands of social media posts about Taylor Swift and The Life of a Showgirl discourse and are claiming to have the ability to break down the discourse in different pieces of audience makeup that they categorize as typical users, influencers, outliers, facilitators, and power players.

Now, how exactly the behavioral patterns of all these different groups break down, they don't go into the specifics of in their report on this whole thing. There's little to no scientific explanation as to how they came to certain conclusions. And while this tech startup doesn't necessarily claim that these negative narratives and allegations against Taylor Swift were the bulk of the conversation around The Life of a Showgirl, they do allege there was a clearly defined group of people engaging in these arguments who had an outsized influence on the broader discourse. Again, the argument beyond there is that these actions were somehow all coordinated in some way, whether it be these claims of Taylor Swift being a Nazi or somehow being like Kanye

Digging deeper into this article, this tech startup seems to be Rolling Stone's only main source for all this information. Well, this tech startup and the people connected to it. So Rolling Stone is not really doing any deeper fact-checking of their own. If they're doing any verification of anything this startup has said, posted, or tried to argue here, they haven't said anything about it in this article. They're not saying, "Oh, well, we checked everything they said. We dug in everything they said, and we found it ourselves to be true because X, Y, and Z." You know, like normal journalistic investigation practices. Rolling Stone is essentially blindly accepting the narrative that this attack was coordinated. Their claim of where these narratives originate is shaky at best because they don't substantiate it, and the deeper details of this story seem a lot less nefarious when you look at them further into the piece:

"Once the provocations were injected into the Swift discourse — often they appeared in edgy or online forums like 4chan or KiwiFarms before migrating to popular social apps..."

Okay, not for nothing, but while a lot of extreme and outlandish rhetoric originates from those types of platforms, they're not exactly housing the best and brightest of society over there. So the idea of framing this as some crazy, CIA-level PSYOP seems a little over-the-top.

"...they were organically sustained by people challenging them on mainstream platforms. This, in turn, algorithmically reinforced their visibility."

This is more of a problem of how social media works now. A core issue with pretty much every streaming platform you can find now, especially Twitter, is that often algorithms push up anything that is hateful, controversial, or polarizing because that's literally all these apps are here to do: keep you engaged and sometimes angry at what you're seeing in order to keep you on the app longer. Which, if there's any coordination happening here, it's there. It's social media engineers and algorithms collaborating with the worst in our society to platform and generate content that pisses normal people off.

"This false narrative did not remain confined to fringe conspiratorial spaces; it successfully pulled typical users into comparisons between Swift and Kanye West...This demonstrates how a strategically seeded falsehood can convert into widespread authentic discourse, reshaping public perception even when most users do not believe the originating claim."

I mean, this sounds very concerning and logical and big research-brained in concept, but without any actual data, statistics, or information about how all these conversations and replies and interactions specifically went that this AI platform analyzed, you might as well just be subjectively describing the vibes in the room. It may be true that some insane shit about Taylor Swift originated from one of these platforms like it sometimes does, but that in and of itself is different than painting this picture where there's a secret cabal of people who have all basically just come together, strategized, and agreed, "We're all going to say this, and you're going to do this, and you're going to do that, and you're going to do this other thing." The article is genuinely concerned trolling is like, "We're talking about some Mission: Impossible level shit here!", when in actuality, groups of people coming together to collectively hate on stuff on the internet is not news. If you want to talk about active harassment campaigns, can this AI platform do an anthropological dig on the fucking Swiftie fanbase?

It's just so funny this is a conversation because often the Taylor Swift fanbase is the quickest to harass other people, and spread false narratives, and hate on people, and so on and so forth.

[From Episode 6 of Unapologetically Angel, featuring Kayla Nicole:]

Angel Reese: Because of who he started to date, the negativity from her fan club or her fans, have affected you?

Kayla Nicole: That level of hate and just online chaos, does it impact me? It does. You could go to my most recent post and it will be people debating each other why I am worthless, and I'll never be a talented person, and I have no career, and I'm a bum. I think that there's something about that level of fame that attracts crazy people. It's unfortunate because I've never done anything to warrant that backlash."

I can't help but feel like there's a little bit of projection going on here in this piece. Because if there's any coordination going on here, it's between Rolling Stone and this tech startup. When you look at how prominently these guys place this Taylor Swift article on their own website, and you scroll down, look at their services, and then go back and look at the article again, it all just reads like a big, giant fucking advertisement. Like, "Oh, hey, look at us. We valiantly protected Taylor Swift from being labeled a Nazi. If we did that and got this article out there about it, just think of what we could do for you as we dig into other social media narratives around you on Twitter or wherever else!"

What's even more disturbing is there are seemingly dozens of different outlets that have picked this story up and are just repeating what Rolling Stone has posted, even though all Rolling Stone is doing is just repeating the narrative this tech startup is handing them, which again, all of these articles being posted everywhere, seems more coordinated than anything anybody was saying about the "Opalite" necklaces. And honestly, given how eager Rolling Stone is to support Taylor Swift in order to continue getting the access that they need to do the coverage that they want of her music, of her art, and of herself personally, it's hard to imagine that Taylor Swift had absolutely no knowledge that this article was coming out. I mean, certainly she's aware of it dropping now and seemingly doesn't care that this whole thing is a fluff piece at best.

And while personally, I don't really disagree with the take that Taylor Swift is not a Nazi and anybody pushing that narrative is maybe a little unhinged, it's hard to see that takeaway as being this only article's [only] intention, because in the wake of this article being posted, I've had at least several unhinged The Life of a Showgirl Twitter avatar accounts painting criticisms I've had of Taylor's work and her public image over the past few weeks as being basically in line with anybody who would compare her to Kanye West. And again, for the broader Taylor Swift fanbase, this seems to be what they're doing with this piece: alleging that basically anybody who would question Taylor's politics in any way whatsoever must have been duped into this crazy bot campaign that's all propaganda, all lies, all fake.

Not only does this feel like an instance of mass gaslighting, but it also grossly feels like just another way of normalizing AI, because where this startup in Rolling Stone should be showing evidence, they're just like, pointing to some magical unknown interface or algorithm that, once we punched in some code, just told us magically that these people were the real fans. These people were the bots spreading false information because Taylor is actually a perfect angel, and anyone saying otherwise has just been misinformed. (Which, I mean, that's my drag name, Miss Informed.)

But yeah, this insane. And shame on Rolling Stone for posting this without actually verifying anything that this fucking startup is telling them. And if they did verify any of it or all of it, I mean, you should tell us; that's just basic shit! If you're writing a thorough piece making claims as bold as, "Anybody who's saying this about Taylor Swift has been duped into a propaganda campaign," you tell us what you know, and you also tell us how you know it. That's how we know that we can know what you claim to know. And that's the power of knowing!

Anthony Fantano. Taylor Swift. Bots. Forever.