Fake MAGA influencers advance agendas aligned with hostile foreign states.
Hostile foreign actors are increasingly using social media to drive a wedge into Donald Trump’s political coalition. Using open-source intelligence and analyses of online activity, we explore this phenomenon, which we call “fake MAGA,” in a recent report for the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI).
Our report defines fake MAGA influencers as those who use “Make America Great Again” or “America First” branding to target these audiences but are in fact linked to large-scale bot farms—as evidenced by the creation of massive numbers of such accounts at opportune moments on X. That is, our analysis reveals coordinated account-creation spikes (for instance, during Elon Musk’s Twitter acquisition), followed by synchronized amplification of identical narratives by those same accounts during a crisis.
