State the obvious: Celebrities often endorse political candidates.
You wouldn’t know that from recent chatter in conservative circles online and on TV that have added “psyop” to singer Taylor Swift’s lengthy resume. (Psyop is shorthand for psychological operation.)
The prospect of Swift endorsing President Joe Biden a second time has sent some allies of former President Donald Trump down a conspiratorial rabbit hole about a Democratic plot involving Swift.
Other iterations of the theory claim Swift’s romance with Kansas City Chiefs star Travis Kelce — and his team’s upcoming appearance in Super Bowl LXIII — is orchestrated to benefit Democrats.
Examples include:
Those examples were just from the past week; suspicion about Swift’s role in a plot to distract Americans or help Biden has been simmering for months in fringe online forums.
In early January, Fox News host Jesse Watters devoted a segment to promoting the Swift-psyop conspiracy theory, using supervillain-esque imagery and omitting important context.
Watters’ primetime segment laid the groundwork for more mainstream conspiratorial commentary after Swift’s January appearances at Kelce’s playoff games.
“You’ve got Taylor Swift herself,” said Whitney Phillips, a University of Oregon assistant professor of digital platforms and media ethics who researches conspiratorial belief and identity. “You’ve got the connection to the NFL, which just adds additional energy. You’ve got the fact that we’re approaching the 2024 election. You have the fact that Kelce was in those COVID vaccine commercials.”
Any one of those things could dominate a news cycle. Combined, Phillips said, it’s a cultural “perfect storm.”
Fodder for influencers
Before Watters’ segment aired, speculation about Swift’s potential as a government operative was fodder for discussion on X and podcasts.
In June, the hosts of the podcast Macrodosing questioned whether Swift’s brief relationship with musician Matty Healy was orchestrated to cover up the existence of aliens. (A former military officer went public with claims that the U.S. government possessed nonhuman spacecraft).
“We started this out kind of joking around about the Taylor Swift thing,” said host Eric Sollenberger, also known as PFT Commenter. “Is Taylor Swift — is she a CIA asset? … What better way to distract America from finding out about aliens than having just Taylor Swift announce that she got dumped?”
Some of the Macrodosing hosts acknowledged the theory’s outlandishness and laughed at themselves.
Others were more serious about how Swift, who endorsed Biden in 2020 with a tray of cookies, could be used in the 2024 election.
On National Voter Registration Day in September, Swift encouraged her Instagram followers to register to vote. Vote.org reported 35,000 registrations that day, up from 25,000 on the same day in 2022.
This action fed conspiracy theories. Mike Benz — a former State Department official under Trump who NBC News reported was once a content creator associated with white nationalists — shared a headline in September about Swift’s activism, writing on X: “I told you Taylor Swift was going to be wielded as instrument of statecraft…”
Benz had previously pushed the “statecraft” idea on his social media accounts.
Benz, who has more than 140,000 X followers, saw more evidence of government interference after a Dec. 2 opinion piece in The Hill discussed how Swift could “save Joe Biden.”
Swift stayed in the headlines as she attended Kelce’s games in fall and took her “Eras” tour to Argentina and Brazil in November. In December, Time magazine named her “Person of the Year.”
Former Trump policy adviser Stephen Miller wrote Dec. 6 on X, “What’s happening with Taylor Swift is not organic.”
Watters’ role
Early in his Jan. 9 broadcast, Watters flashed onscreen an edited photo of Swift with red lasers for eyes. Watters, who took over former Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s evening slot in July, speculated that Swift’s popularity isn’t tied to her musical talent.
“Well around four years ago, the Pentagon psychological operations unit floated turning Taylor Swift into an asset during a NATO meeting,” Watters said. “What kind of asset? A psyop for combating online misinformation.”
He aired a clip of data engineer Alicia Marie Bargar saying at a conference almost five years ago that “social influence can help encourage or promote behavior change.” Bargar, who then worked as a research engineer at Johns Hopkins’ Applied Physics Laboratory, mentioned Swift as an example, because she is “a fairly influential online person.”
Watters cut in, saying, “Primetime obviously has no evidence” that Swift is a “front for a covert political agenda.” But he continued, mentioning Swift’s voter-registration efforts and that her relationship with Kelce had boosted the NFL’s ratings. “So how’s the psyop going?”
Bargar told Business Insider that her comment came from the 2019 International Conference on Cyber Conflict organized by NATO’s cyber defense hub — and that Watters took it out of context.
Swift was “an incidental example of a famous person to explain a social network analysis concept to the audience,” Bargar said. “This is a commonly used approach in academia to make theoretical concepts easier to understand.”
In the full clip, Bargar discussed ways to counter covert influence campaigns. Because one way involved training influential people to spread desired messages, she mentioned Swift, who had shared a photo of herself next to a voting sign.
Not a psyop, ‘period’
Bargar said that U.S. celebrities regularly post pictures of themselves voting to encourage others to vote, a strategy that “has a measurable effect” on turnout. Bargar went on to explain other methods for countering influence campaigns without mentioning Swift. Bargar told Business Insider she has no affiliation with NATO or the Pentagon.
“Taylor Swift is not part of a DOD psychological operation. Period,” Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh told PolitiFact Feb. 2. “I’m sure she has other chief priorities, as do we.”
PolitiFact reached out to Bargar and Swift’s spokesperson, but did not hear back.
Watters was the main amplifier of the Swift-as-psyop conspiracy theory, said NewsGuard senior analyst Macrina Wang. NewsGuard tracks online misinformation and produces weekly “Reality Check” reports.
Data from NewsGuard’s media monitoring tools showed a 13,000% increase in online mentions of “Taylor Swift” and “psyop” from Jan. 8 to Jan. 10 — the day after Watters’ Jan. 9 show, Wang said. That included mentions on X, Reddit, websites, blogs, news sites and forums — largely excluding mentions that aimed to debunk the idea.
When Kelce’s Kansas City Chiefs beat the Baltimore Ravens on Jan. 28, former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, shared “wild speculation” that the Super Bowl would be rigged for Kelce’s team ahead of a “major presidential endorsement coming from an artificially culturally propped-up couple this fall.”
Days later on X, Benz scrutinized Swift’s use of emojis and punctuation — a behavior not so different from Swifties on the prowl for Easter eggs — to speculate that the conspiracy dated back years. He said it appeared Swift had been “handed” language critical of Trump ahead of the 2020 election.
‘A badge of honor’
Phillips said she sees conservative commentators’ efforts to target Swift as an attempt to “grab the cultural microphone.” They are essentially arguing that Swift “is a form of liberal propaganda” who might mobilize people to vote for Democrats and “take away the voices of Republicans,” Phillips said.
“Taylor Swift is just a perfect opportunity to make that argument and make it loud and make it so that people can’t help but write articles about it,” she said.
Wang said that media scrutiny and fact-checks seemed to encourage proponents of the Swift theory to dig in their heels.
“It comes from this systemic distrust of media and the establishment … and it’s almost like a badge of honor that people are trying to debunk the claim,” Wang said.
PolitiFact researcher Caryn Baird and PolitiFact senior correspondent Amy Sherman contributed to this report.