A new study has shown that Russian hackers and online trolls love to impersonate Kid Rock on far-right websites such as Parler, Gab, and even The Former President and Soon-to-Be Leavenworth Resident's own site, Truth Social. The report was compiled by the social media tracking firm Graphika and Stanford University's Internet Observatory.
The study, titled Bad Reputation: Suspected Russian Actors Leverage Alternative Tech Platforms in Continued Effort to Covertly Influence Right-Wing U.S. Audiences (boy, that's a mouthful) reports that during this year's midterm elections, sites like the ones previously mentioned pushed and amplified misinformation and false narratives as a mean to influence agendas and sow discord and mistrust among American people, casting doubt on democracy itself.
The study indicates that "actors behind this activity use fake personas to pose as members of the community they are attempting to infiltrate and influence. The Kid Rock 'fan page' accounts were by far the most successful in this regard, building a large follower base and reportedly viewed online as genuine Kid Rock accounts. However, we also identified other personas presenting as authentic right-wing users."
The accounts are usually identified as fan pages, but never are they verified and more and more, social media users are mistaking posts from these accounts to be the actual Kid Rock himself. In June, Little Donnie Jr. (who's "room" in Leavenworth is also being readied) shared "a screenshot with his 6.1 million Instagram followers of a post by a Gettr account in the operation that purported to be a fan page for musician Kid Rock," the paper illustrates.
However, these actors "were first exposed in 2020, again in 2021, and most recently ahead of the 2022 U.S. midterms… [But] Due to an apparent lack of enforcement, the actors have established a degree of persistence unavailable on most mainstream platforms and are able to conduct their operations with relative ease."
I guess this should be no surprise, in some ways, given the cult of personality that exists around the discredited ex-president, as well as Kid Rock's own buddy-buddy relationship with him.
The pair made headlines when Rock revealed that Trump once asked him for advice on what to do about North Korea. In an interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Rock said he and Trump were "looking at maps. I'm like, you know, like, 'Am I supposed to be in on this shit?' Like I make dirty records sometimes. I do. 'What do you think we should do about North Korea?' I'm like, 'What? I don't think I'm qualified to answer this.'"
Um, yeah…. you think? Maybe Ye was busy that day.
