Everyone's running anonymous political accounts now

Last October, Democratic Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner was facing a full barrage of attacks. A steady stream of negative stories was hitting the political news cycle, surfacing old social media comments he'd made, attacking his biography, and later, revealing that he had a tattoo resembling a Nazi symbol. Taken in aggregate, those attacks dominated the conversation about the race for weeks, and gave a glimmer of hope to his establishment-backed Democratic opponent, Gov. Janet Mills.

What some political observers may not realize is that many of those attacks were injected into the political bloodstream through an anonymous X account called the @MaineStatePress. Branded to look like a local news site, the account posted dozens of tweets attacking Platner and amplifying every negative story the moment it dropped. It was one of the first accounts to share the image of Platner sporting the chest tattoo linked to Nazi imagery, a post that racked up millions of views and nearly torpedoed his campaign.

Despite the account having only a few hundred followers, it earned shares from some of the country's most prominent political journalists and seasoned operatives in record time. Then, the moment Mills dropped out and it became clear Platner would emerge as the Democratic Party's presumptive nominee, the @MaineStatePress stopped posting about the race altogether.

To this day, no one has publicly identified the person or group behind the account. I reached out to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and Senate Majority PAC, both of which supported Platner's primary opponent, to ask if they were behind it. Representatives for each told me they weren't involved. The Platner campaign did not respond to a request for comment. 

Anonymous-seeming political brands

Since Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter in 2022, anonymous political accounts on X have become ubiquitous. One of the biggest vectors of anti-Harris conspiracy theories in 2024 was an anonymous X account called Black Insurrectionist, which turned out to be run by a White guy in Upstate New York. The account had spread fabricated documents alleging Kamala Harris received debate questions in advance and that Tim Walz had sexually abused a student in the 1990s, both of which were amplified by Donald Trump, JD Vance, and prominent Republican members of Congress before fact-checkers identified the materials as forgeries. In February, a WIRED investigation revealed that one of the most viral conservative influencers on the platform, @JohnnyMAGA, was actually a Trump White House staffer moonlighting on the side. 

There are many other instances of this in the political space, some more successful than others, and a fresh crop of accounts has been gaining traction as the midterms ramp up.

Last week, after POLITICO's Adam Wren published a quick-hit piece alleging that a progressive candidate for U.S. Senate in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, had misrepresented his resume, I noticed a random X account I hadn't seen before also sharing Wren's story. The account looked like a polished campaign brand, named "First to Hear It." Over the past year, @firsttohearit has been sharing a variety of content, including select political polling, videos showing certain Democratic candidates in a favorable light, and anti-MAGA political news. But buried among its many posts were more than a few critical of Michigan U.S. Senate candidates El-Sayed and Rep. Haley Stevens, and very supportive of Mallory McMorrow, who is facing those two in a competitive three-way primary. 

Although the account's profile and bio do not disclose any affiliation with a political organization, it is one of many that anonymous Democratic staffers run and maintain, holding on to and rebranding old X accounts cycle over cycle to amplify content. I was actually more curious how the account had accumulated so many followers in such a short time, but after I ran it through a Twitter forensics tool, it turned out the owner had rebranded the handle from a John Fetterman fan account used during the 2022 election cycle called @FetterWins.

For opposition research in particular, these types of anonymous accounts and brands serve as a perfect, usually untraceable vehicle for pushing research into the feeds of high-profile strategists and reporters, driving the conversation online. Even an X account with a modest following, like @MaineStatePress, can drop a nugget of information and watch campaign staffers and political reporters reshare it within minutes, setting off an entire news cycle.

Undisclosed account handovers and rebrands

Anonymous accounts also change hands often, and operators can rebrand and rename them to take on a new purpose while maintaining their large follower counts.

Operatives have long used this type of account transfer or sale in the non-political space, but it is becoming increasingly common in politics. That's because it's exceedingly difficult to build a following from zero (especially for liberals on X these days) and sometimes easier to break through in algorithmic feeds if your account already has thousands of followers. It works pretty simply: someone hands over the login information, the new owner runs the account through a service like Tweet Delete or Redact to wipe it of past posts, and then they rebrand the handle and profile information, with the old followers likely not noticing. The new owner and brand gain the appearance of established clout and influence.

I saw this in practice just last week, when the sometimes-controversial centrist organization Third Way decided to launch a new media brand called "Unmoderated News." I thought it was weird that the new media play would immediately rack up more than 18,000 followers on X in just a few days, but a quick scan reveals it is also the result of an account rebrand. Just a few months ago, the account was a Gretchen Whitmer stan account called @WhitmersWins. I quickly figured out that a centrist Democratic digital staffer named Ethan Wolf had given that account to Third Way. Early in the Biden presidency, Wolf started an account called @BidensWins that really took off, and he later rebranded it to DemocraticWins. Today, he runs it as part of a fledgling media operation called Democratic Wins Media.

When asked about the account transfer, Wolf told me he "was happy to contribute an account I helped build [to Third Way]." It's unclear whether Third Way paid Wolf for the account or he just gave it up for free. Third Way did not respond to a request for comment.

Armies of amplifiers

Anonymous brands on X are just one slice of the broader trend. So-called "amplifier accounts" are becoming increasingly common on Instagram and TikTok too, where algorithmic feeds serve users content from accounts they don't follow but might be interested in. Coinciding with the rise of news clipping and news aggregation pages, that shift has created a lucrative new market opportunity for some: political groups on both sides of the aisle now pay consultants or marketing firms to create and grow dozens of innocuous-seeming accounts, often focused on less political interest categories, that can be activated to share campaign messaging when the moment calls for it.

The inevitable result of all this is a political information environment in which campaigns, PACs, and the consultants orbiting them can shape entire news cycles without putting their names on anything. Voters scroll past videos, repost screenshots, and take cues from accounts whose origins they have no realistic way of knowing. And like the operators behind @MaineStatePress, the people running these accounts are betting that by the time anyone figures out who they are, it won't matter anymore.

Democratic National Committee chair Ken Martin continues to face criticism and calls for his resignation, as the national party's money woes persist and its much-hyped 2024 autopsy stays under wraps. Martin's defenders note that the party carries severe debt because the DNC has invested so heavily in state party infrastructure, sending more money to state parties than ever before. According to FEC data that strategist Tim Tagaris compiled and shared on X, that's absolutely correct: the DNC is indeed sending large sums of money each month to every state party. Here's what that looks like cycle over cycle.

Those investments are critical, especially as Democrats face extinction-level events in the South over the next decade. Whether the DNC can currently afford to make them, however, is another story. At this point in 2022, the DNC had $57 million cash on hand and less than $1 million in debt. Today, it's $18 million in debt, with just $13.8 million in the bank.

Rep. Doris Matsui (D-CA), an 81-year-old, 11-term Democratic congresswoman, is telling her corporate and special interest super PACs to run ads supporting her Republican opponent. It’s a cynical move to stay in power, as Matsui is facing a tough primary challenge from fellow Democrat Mai Vang, and she would rather run against a Republican in November than against a progressive who refuses corporate money. Under California's top-two "jungle" primary system, the two highest finishers advance to the general election regardless of party, so lifting the Republican into second place would lock Vang out of a head-to-head fight this fall, assuring Matsui’s re-election.