Nicki Minaj’s spree of tweets about President Donald Trump and his conservative politics is allegedly driven by bots.
Nicki Minaj’s ongoing posts about President Trump and conservative-leaning politics are mostly amplified by thousands of bots on social media, according to a report published by Politico on Monday (February 23). The politics website shared a report compiled by disinformation detection company Cyabra that discovered more than 18,000 bots and their coordinated efforts to steal the New York rapper’s MAGA posts on X and boost them on the platform.
Per Politico, “The analysis, which looks at social media activity between November 11 and December 28, provides a window into how the rapper was able to rack up millions of views online and position himself as a celebrity the White House deems worthy of working with. Last month, Minaj attended a Trump account summit with the president, who invited her onstage and then showered her with an intimate video.”
Dan Brahmy, CEO and founder of Cyabra, told the site that most of the activity came from fake profiles.
“We don’t really see a massive, high-impact orchestration of bad actors and fake actors at the intersection of geopolitical drivers and music culture,” he said. “It’s rare in our space to see the integration of bad and fake online worlds into the entertainment world.”
The company’s CEO added that they found a large number of inauthentic accounts repeatedly using “highly similar language” to praise Nicki’s posts, particularly in response to posts from verifiable accounts criticizing the rap queen.
Overall, bot accounts have been a problem on X, even before Elon Musk’s ownership and subsequent Twitter name change. However, the current dominance of these accounts on the platform shows that there is no real barrier to their intrusion into users’ timelines with propaganda.
Meanwhile, Trump media adviser Alex Bruesewitz blasted Politico’s report and dismissed Cyabra’s findings as unreliable because of the company’s alleged ties to hip-hop celebrities who are enemies of Nicki Minaj, particularly Cardi B.
“This story is 100% bullshit! @NICKIMINAJ, the most popular female rapper of all time, doesn’t need ‘robots’ promoting her on social media,” he wrote on the X. “Politico’s Jason Beeferman is also a fake news hack who failed to disclose that Cybara, the company that conducted this story, has a relationship with Cardi B’s agent.”
“This agent introduced me to Cybara a few months ago, and he’s a great guy by the way, but that’s an important detail to ignore,” he continued. “I even had dinner with the co-founders of the company and they offered to do some testing for me. I liked them personally but found their ‘tools’ to be highly unreliable and their data almost worthless. I believe @elonmusk also had them work at X but then fired them.”
He added: “Given the public controversy surrounding the music industry, Beaverman’s failure to disclose this relationship is extremely unethical and inappropriate.”
“Fake news is the enemy of the people!” Brusewitz concluded.
Cady heard about Bruesewitz’s posts on X, lashed out at him and allegedly threatened to sue him for defamation.
“Listen, you got me involved in something that has nothing to do with me, so now we’re going to talk about the facts,” she clapped back in a post on X. “Cyabra is a data company that has a lot of investors like Mike G, clients like Elon Musk and PepsiCo use the company for data, and it even has Mike Pompeo on its advisory board.”
“So what you need to focus on is that the data is very real and let me distance myself from your nonsense. I have nothing to do with it and I don’t give it AF!” she continued. “Now lie and say that’s not true!!! See what happens when you involve me in something that has nothing to do with me? I’m going to take it to the gristle!! BTW I’m still going to sue you, you filthy bitch.”
Alex Bruesewitz and Cardi B continued to go back and forth over Politico’s article about Nicki Minaj in multiple posts. Their intense interaction on X can be seen below.
