Three days after KAMALA HARRIS campaigned alongside Lizzo at a rally in Detroit, news emerged that cast an embarrassing shadow over the much-hyped event.

“Lizzo reportedly charged $2.3 Million from the Harris-Walz campaign to attend a Detroit rally once,” the post read.

This was interesting news that was quickly embraced by conservative commentators. Clay Travis mocked the revelation on his own show. Sean Spicer I called him “Pretty desperate.” Margot Cleveland, senior legal reporter federalistlaughed Harris people who pay for entertainment to show up on his behalf.

The post was fiction. The account that “broke” the story was “Bad Hombre”, one of the cycle’s most treacherous posters about X. With 115,000 followers, Bad Hombre has gained influence and visibility on the right as a prolific source of tweets using journalism. While the posts are nothing more than MAGA fan fiction, the language and framing are used to create the impression of actual reporting. It is literally fake news.

Much of Bad Hombre’s content is based on stories and some information taken from other publications. But occasionally a post might give the impression that Bad Hombre has inside access to people in Harris’ immediate orbit (or orbit). Washington Post newsroom) and gleefully spills the tea.

Days before Lizzo’s post, the account’s bio read “Political commentary.” Catholic. Populist.”—published post below:

Big drama in Kamala Harris’ campaign this morning. A source revealed that Harris yelled and angrily berated campaign manager Julie Chavez on the phone this morning for more than 30 minutes. . . . Chavez burst into tears during the phone call as Kamala tore him apart, calling him stupid, incompetent, terrible at your damn job, and saying his stupid advice would be the reason he lost.

Real Harris campaign sources were completely confused.

It’s impossible to know the extent of Bad Hombre’s reach. But Chavez’s fabricated story alone has been viewed seven million times, according to key metrics X has made publicly available in posts.

Sometimes Bad Hombre will publish some “news” based on actual public information. But these scraps of reported facts are presented in a way that fundamentally distorts the story. Gwen Walz on October 22 canceled reproductive rights speech in Maine without any explanation. Bad Hombre got the news, I’m publishing this The vice presidential candidate’s wife had canceled the event “in anger” because “Kamala spoke to Tim Walz and told him that his wife’s overbearing attitude was hurting him with male voters.” This post has been viewed 1.8 million times.

one of his more infamous posts-Falsely accusing a Republican couple who supported Harris in Pennsylvania of being paid actors and left-wing filmmakers- Sky News Australia to do an entire episode on this as if it were true. (“It was great investigative journalism by the journalist who went and found out about it,” says one Sky News contributor.) The couple said their life had descended into chaos, but they have embraced ever since Their roles as Harris surrogates.

Rumors, innuendos and made-up stories have, of course, always been essential elements of politics. But what stands out about the current wave of political lies is how widely it can spread and how little capacity there is to guard against it. This is especially true of Elon Musk’s X, the Wild West of social media; Here, content moderation on real issues comes almost entirely from community notes. Since community rating placement relies on Reddit-style upvoting to rate “helpfulness,” the feature seems open to malicious manipulation, provided you can coordinate enough users of the app. Authentication for users has also been overhauled, so anyone who pays will receive a blue checkmark; This means there are fewer reliable indicators to help people determine at a glance which sources of information are more trustworthy. The result is a growing stream of fake bullshit, pumped into a sewer whose algorithm often delivers the worst of it to millions of people’s phones.

But what stands out in the closing of the campaign is how these nonsense are presented: not just as hostile, speculative, malicious readings of reported stories publicly accessible, but as scoops, news, or insider information accessible to the poster. has special access.

This particular type of content may seem obvious to seasoned political observers who encounter it. But most people using X do not have high media literacy, they do not initially trust real media and are ready to believe alternative sources promoted to them on the platform, even those with names like Bad Hombre. And sometimes even experts can get confused.

Bad Hombre on Tuesday sent “Veteran Democratic strategist James Carville is telling campaign advisers and top donors behind the scenes that Kamala Harris is headed for a historic blowout, telling them she will lose all the swing states and possibly New Hampshire and Virginia, too.”

carville replied hours later, calling Bad Hombre an “ass wiper” and offering to pay the Trump campaign $100 if a “trustworthy person” said they heard him say it.

I reached out to Carville shortly after and asked how she heard about the offending post.

“Al Hunt called me,” he said, referring to the esteemed reporter. He said three people called him in panic. . . . People were talking about it. “If Al Hunt gets three phone calls, I can assure you he didn’t get them from MAGA people.”

Bad Hombre is far from X’s only purveyor of this kind of MAGA fanfiction. Ryan Fournier, president of Students for Trump. he tweeted last week A “source in DC” told him: “Kamala’s internal polling is terrible… She will lose Pennsylvania and Michigan. Trump has a VERY good chance of winning this election. I don’t care about her, but I’m starting to see her as the better choice.” ” Fournier added “Holy Shit” (dirty asterisk in the original) for good measure This post has been viewed 889,000 times.

Days ago “some sources” he told Fournier He said Harris “tore into campaign manager Julie Chavez in a conversation that lasted about 30 minutes” and told her “she was terrible at her job and that would be the reason she lost.” Somehow, no one following the campaign received a similar comment. Just Bad Hombre shared a post about Chavez. hours ago Fournier.

Fake news posts are easy to spot because sometimes real-life events get in the way.

Naperville Politics Man on October 23 Posted on Twitter: “My sources tell me the Quinnipiac poll will have Harris trailing in both Michigan and Wisconsin.” Poll after hours output Harris leads in Michigan and is tied in Wisconsin.

An account with the username @akafacehots on October 24 sent “In a stunning leak, emails from Kamala Harris’s campaign manager to her entire campaign team warn that they will fire anyone who speaks to the press.” Miraculously, the leak was stopped immediately after the hot information reached that person’s inbox. More than 814,000 people viewed this post.

@ProudElephantUS account on October 26 sent “Kamala’s campaign released a photo of herself in her McDonald’s outfit to prove that she actually works there.” The account added that there was something wrong with the photo: “it was a photoshopped image over a white woman’s (sic) face.” But there was another problem: Harris’ campaign never released any photos. @ProudElephantUS made this up.

These examples may seem like minor incidents in the larger media landscape; These are not the kinds of events that could disrupt the election or spoil the candidacy of potential Harris voters. The bigger problem is the greater sense of unreality they help create on X and related platforms, which exhausts users and encourages their skepticism about politics in general. But occasionally made-up things are shouted through the biggest megaphone.

Musk last week he shared it himself Screenshot of a story published by Atlantic “TRUMP IS EXACTLY HITLER” with the headline. The screenshot was a fabrication; Nothing similar to the alleged article had been published in the magazine. Readers dutifully added a community note to Musk’s tweet stating that the screenshot was a satirical fabrication. But it remains to this day.