Media

Influencer mystery

The organizers of a mysterious network paid influencers to promote sexual smears of Vice President Kamala Harris as Democrats rallied around her to be their presidential candidate in late July.

The attacks were part of a campaign that was, on the surface, an unremarkable part of a new wave of social media marketing. It’s blurred the lines in both US political parties between paid advertising and the posts of enthusiastic supporters — as partisan influencers often cast themselves — who just happen to be paid.

The network that would push the sexual smears began with more run-of-the-mill Republican talking points, but it was unusual in one way, a person who participated in its video calls said: None of the participants identified themselves by name, and all joined calls with their cameras off to preserve their mutual anonymity. However, Semafor was able to identify one of them: former New York Republican Rep. George Santos, who spoke up on one conference call to object when the parties discussed making sexual allegations against Harris.

This influencer network was organized over emails and Zoom calls, and payments on the platform Zelle, according to Zoom invitations and Zelle receipts reviewed by Semafor, plus the descriptions of a person who participated in the calls. The money was good: One participant made more than $20,000 for several weeks of boosting assigned messages, according to the Zelle receipts.

The calls were organized by a man who went by the name James Bacon. He sent emails with the invitations to the calls, one of which was seen by Semafor, to influencers. The Zelle payments also came in his name.

The calls in June and early July encouraged participants to push familiar Republican talking points on X and, in particular, on Spaces, the platform’s live audio product. In the early summer, those talking points included attacking Judge Juan Merchan during Donald Trump’s hush money trial in New York, casting President Joe Biden as feeble, and accusing Democrats of weaponizing the government against conservatives.

An invitation to a call on Monday, July 22, arrived under the subject line “War Room — Kamala Messaging,” according to an invitation seen by Semafor. At the time, Harris was fast consolidating support as the Democratic nominee, and Republicans were unsure of how to blunt her progress.

The influencers’ marching orders were clear: make a series of lurid sexual jibes aimed at Harris, the least crude of which was comparing her to Haliey Welch, the “Hawk Tuah girl” who became a viral sensation over a video of her discussing oral sex.

At that point, a recognizable voice on the anonymous call spoke up to object: Santos, the former Long Island congressman who now faces sentencing in federal court and has remade himself as a social media figure, announced that he disapproved of the messaging and left the call, the person who participated in the call and spoke to Semafor said.

Santos declined to comment on the incident, but later appeared to post on X about the situation:

“Oddly enough conservative influencers talking about Kamala’s sex life and race!” he tweeted July 24, less than 48 hours after he’d left the influencer call. “Please God make it stop….”

Sports culture boom

We spent Mixed Signals this week talking with former ESPN chief John Skipper about a subject I’m obsessed with: the way sports are swallowing American culture and the media business. “Sports is to this decade what celebrity was to the 1990s,” one prominent sports business figure told me.

Part of this is a supply-side phenomenon — money pouring in from gaming, from rich guys in the US and the Gulf, and from content-hungry streamers who have supercharged everything from women’s soccer to pickleball. But some of it is also this cultural moment. Skipper’s dual diagnosis: “Everyone along a continuum of traditional media to disruptive media is finding that sports is the best and most valuable content,” and “it is a safe subject in a world where you’re not going to say, ‘Do you hate or love Trump?’”

It’s a great conversation — you can listen and follow Mixed Signals’ latest episode wherever you get your podcasts.

A new sports site

A new brand is hoping to provide a hub for the booming conversation around the culture of sports.

OffBall launched Sunday as a website, newsletter, and social feed that seeks to apply a human touch to curate the flood of conversations about sports in popular culture.

OffBall’s co-founders are Michaela Hammond, who was part of the founding team of The Players’ Tribune; former Sports Illustrated executive editor Chris Stone; and Adam Mendelsohn, whose comms firm Upland Workshop played a role in starting new media outlets Puck and LeBron James’ SpringHill Company.

The new outlet’s homepage directs users to posts on X and Instagram and to other websites, rather than its own pages — which its founders see as an alternative to ubiquitous, low-quality aggregation. They said the goal is to help users navigate the sprawling online conversation, and to combat what they see as a cheapening of sports culture online.

“There is nothing more compelling than sports. The characters and narratives in sports [are] one of the last shared experiences. But the internet isn’t designed for the way people want to enjoy sports. When you take out algorithms and aggregation, have real people curating the best stuff, and prioritize creators and journalism, it’s very different. Sports is the perfect place to try something unapologetically optimistic,” said Mendelsohn.

On Sunday, the OffBall homepage linked to a New York Times story on Yankees fashion, a YouTube ad teasing Kendrick Lamar’s 2025 Super Bowl performance, a ranking of links to top NFL “hype videos,” and a link to fashion site Highsnobriety proclaiming that “Willy Chavarria’s Adidas Collab Is Literally on Point.”

Foreign influence crackdown

The Justice Department in recent weeks has dropped a series of indictments that target people many Washington journalists know personally. The right-wing influencers Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, and Benny Johnson, my old BuzzFeed colleague, all allegedly (unwittingly, they say) took truckloads of Russian money; Washington Post columnist Max Boot’s wife is allegedly an undisclosed South Korean agent; and Dimitri Simes, a DC foreign policy eminence, has been charged with working for a sanctioned Russian TV network — and is now safely in Moscow.

A Justice Department official wouldn’t comment on the timing, but it sure feels like prosecutors got the memo to wrap up their investigations well in advance of the November election. And the net effect is to expose how porous the media and public conversation in Washington remains to foreign money — much of it openly disclosed, but much of it seeping from below the surface.

TikTok news news

The DNC this year showed us that traditional media is out and TikTokers are in. Kyle Tharp and Lucy Ritzmann from the FWIW newsletter note that among legacy brands, the Daily Mail is by far the most-liked on TikTok.

We’ve merged FWIW’s ranking of legacy brands with some of the biggest individual news voices on TikTok for a sense of what’s happening on this massive platform.

The chart isn’t comprehensive or exhaustive, but includes the biggest legacy brands and key creators: Dylan Page, a British creator with almost a billion likes, is a self-proclaimed “news daddy”; Philip DeFranco is a veteran YouTube news commentator; V Spehar’s Under the Desk News; and the former RFK Jr. adviser Link Lauren. Our takeaway: Influencers matter, but there’s a huge volume of regular news circulating on there, too.

Musk and the media

Kate Conger and Ryan Mac are tech reporters for The New York Times and authors of the new book ”Character Limit.” They spoke with Ben as part of our recurring Semaforum series.

Ben: How much of Musk’s own identity and way of being in the world now is a product of spending a lot of time on Twitter?

Ryan: I think a lot. If you go back and look at his early tweets, it’s very funny, because he really didn’t like the medium. His earliest tweets were like, hanging out with his kids at the ice rink, ... pretty normie stuff. It was just online for everyone to see.

But then he starts to grasp, “this is an outlet for me.” Like he starts tweeting about book recommendations and his thoughts on SpaceX. And then I think there’s a lightbulb moment that clicks for him, where he uses this thing to push back on any media narrative.

Even early Elon hated the media, he loved fighting and debating and pushing back on anything that was wrong. There were tweets about him fighting over a detail in a reporter’s story about what he ate for breakfast and that just became part of what he did every day — so much so that we talked to Twitter or to former staffers of his that were told to go fight, like, some random blogger in Belgium over tweets. He would stay up till 3 a.m. telling his communications staffers to do this. And so that happened over the last decade, where he grew to mistrust media, learned how to use Twitter effectively for his own message, built a following and just spent hours every day on there, to the point where it became his main social circle.

Nights of Net Zero: Powering the Future: Can the Grid Keep Up?

David Hardy, Group EVP and CEO Americas, Ørsted and Kathleen Barrón, EVP and Chief Strategy Officer, Constellation join Semafor on September 23 to discuss the most efficient ways the energy sector can meet the moment and maintain clean, reliable energy. Networking reception to follow. Request Invitation.

The Next 3 Billion

President Julius Maada Bio, Sierra Leone and Mcebisi Jonas, Chairman, MTN Group will join the stage at The Next 3 Billion summit — the premiere U.S. convening dedicated to unlocking one of the biggest social and economic opportunities of our time: connecting the unconnected. Request invitation.

Nights of Net Zero: Climate Advancements & Innovations

Tom Steyer, Co-Executive Chair, Galvanize Climate Solutions, Mary de Wysocki, SVP and Chief Sustainability Officer at Cisco, and Heather Zichal, Global Head of Sustainability, JPMorgan Chase join Semafor for an evening of forward looking discussions on climate finance and AI’s role in advancing low-carbon technologies. This discussion is followed by a networking reception. Request Invitation.

Brian Stelter is returning to CNN, this time as chief media analyst. He’ll be again helming the “Reliable Sources” media newsletter, which relaunches Monday.

⁛ News

Good morning, Vietnam: The US shift away from China has made Vietnam a growing commercial hub and an increasingly interesting setting for stories. The country’s foreign ministry seems delighted by the attention, as a celebratory official article on the latest development — the opening of a New York Times bureau led by Damien Cave — suggests.

Good data: Americans love to argue about whether crime is up or down, and have long done it with slow, bad data the FBI gathers from local cops. The Real Time Crime Index seems to have fixed that, and “allows anyone to see the numbers and trends in novel ways without having to wait for final estimates to be published months later,” project overseer Jeff Asher told Semafor.

Tough work for gatekeepers: The Institute for Nonprofit News rejects more than half of its applications for membership, Nieman Lab reports, including partisan websites that present themselves as independent local news.

Media news news: Natalie Korach is joining the media beat for Vanity Fair. She was a media reporter at The Wrap.

⁜ Tech

End of an era: The online culture writer Ryan Broderick offers a provocative observation: “Virality is decoupling from popularity.” In place of viral online moments that cross into mass culture, he predicts “silos of popularity, online and off, global and regional, real and fake, and none of them will quite add up correctly, but all seem vaguely huge.”

Telegram’s free-for-all: It’s easy to wax poetic about free speech, harder to defend the illegal marketplaces on Telegram spotlighted in a huge Times article.

The best business in digital media: It’s still OnlyFans, which reported $1.31 billion in revenue over the last year.

✰ Hollywood

Dept. of unintended consequences: I was the new New York Times media columnist — and still pretty clueless about Hollywood — when I wrote about Bob Iger’s role helping Disney through COVID-19. That column, James Stewart and Brooks Barnes write, prompted a falling out between Iger and his successor, Bob Chapek, leading to Iger’s departure and, later, his return:

“Mr. Iger denied that he had spoken to Mr. Smith, which only further enraged Mr. Chapek, who pointed out that Mr. Iger’s quote came directly from an email. Mr. Iger said he didn’t understand why Mr. Chapek was so upset. What was wrong with saying he was reasserting control in the midst of a crisis? ‘You’ve cut my legs out from under me,’ Mr. Chapek said. ‘I’ve never felt worse in my life.’”

☊ Audio

Re-explained: Vox is launching a new franchise, Explain It to Me, hosted by Jonquilyn Hill. The product — a call-in podcast, newsletter, and some video — is the successor to The Weeds, a podcast hosted by Ezra Klein before he left for The New York Times.

This version is shifting the emphasis from wonky policy conversations to broader topics, which could include “whether your dentist is scamming you” and “why you say ‘like’ so much,” said Vox editor-in-chief Swati Sharma.

“It’s about really reaching those non-news obsessives,” she said. “Policy is also so personal and it can be easy for people who aren’t following all the white papers to understand.” They’re launching with a sponsor, the e-commerce marketing software company Klaviyo.

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