
We have to remember that the elite/powerful people launch PR campaigns to influence public opinion all the time, and these PR orgs are very skilled at what they do. This has already happened to Blake Lively and other celebrities. Billie Eilish has been speaking out against the ultra-wealthy lately, I don’t see why they wouldn’t want to take her down a peg after that. And no I’m not a fan of her, I have no dogs in this fight
I think it’s both tbh. She’s getting attacked from both the left and the right, and I think it’s not implausible to think there’s an inorganic campaign to smear her as “performative” to discredit her from the left so her message loses steam. Online bot campaigns are a low-cost way to amplify certain messages, and they rely on people’s already existing ignorance. All they have to do is retweet and like certain tweets more to boost them in the algorithm and make the opinions seem popular
Oh and to be clear I do NOT like Blake Lively. She just came to mind as a recent example because there is evidence of a bot campaign against her, possibly from Justin Baldoni after she accused him of sexual misconduct. Another example would be Amber Heard, who I also am not a fan of. There was evidence of botting against her too. There’s lots of crazy politics in the celebrity world
A better example of an artificial smear campaign would be what McDonald’s did against the lady who sued them for getting burned by their hot coffee. This was before social media was big, but they managed to take this case, where this woman received 3rd degree burns and her labia were FUSED TOGETHER from a spilled cup of coffee that was dangerously and excessively hot, and turned it into a story where “some dumb lady just got a little burn because duh coffee is hot” and the public believed it
Another example would be the doordash girl. So many people believe that she opened the door to that man’s house, but from what I’ve seen, all the evidence for that was fabricated. There is suspicious online activity suggesting the narrative is being tampered with, and people are suspecting doordash as the culprit because they have the motivation and means to do so to avoid a lawsuit from this woman or others who have experienced similar exhibitionism incidents while delivering food
The McDonald’s incident has shown us that this was possible for powerful entities to pull off even before social media, so it must be even easier now that we’re all online. And yeah people don’t want to be reminded that we’re on stolen land because that’s a lot to reckon with. It goes hand in hand