The accounts posting these messages aren’t run by celebrity influencers with massive engagement, legions of fans and lucrative product endorsement deals. Most have only a smattering of followers and, often, the people behind them aren’t even based in the United States.
Functioning more like birdshot than a single bullet, these high-volume social media campaigns represent the new vanguard of modern political influence, saturating the internet with a topic until it is all but unavoidable. That can help game social media network algorithms so that they treat coordinated content as organic, spreading the message even wider. Built from dozens or hundreds of posts from accounts you’ve never heard of, they amount to an echo chamber on a budget.
“This is digital astroturfing, plain and simple,” said Samuel Woolley, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh who studies how new technologies can be used to manipulate public opinion on the web. “The more people see an idea online, the more inured to it they become and the more commonplace and acceptable it becomes.”
— Read on www.nytimes.com/2026/09/22/us/politics/influencers-midterms-echo-chamber.html