The Taylor Swift ‘psy op’ conspiracy theory offers a troubling lesson

AS I wrote this, helicopters flew overhead, circling the city where I live. Even though San Francisco lost the Super Bowl against Kansas City, fans were partying – and police were on high alert. For good reason too, as the tragic mass shooting in Kansas City during post-game celebrations attests. In the US, big events often end in horrifying gun violence.

There was an added element of tension in sports fandom this year. Taylor Swift is dating Travis Kelce, who plays for Kansas City – and that means her fans were in the audience at the Super Bowl, basking in her glow. But the issue isn’t whether Swifties are outshining Kansas City fans. It is political.

For the past few months, right-wing influencers online and on Fox News have made increasingly wild claims about how Swift is a psychological operation, or “psy op”, created by the US military. In these conspiracy theories, the idea is that Swift is using her celebrity to broadcast hidden messages about how people in the US should vote for Democrats. Before the game started, presidential hopeful Donald Trump heightened the chaos by declaring that Swift might endorse President Biden for a second term, and called her “disloyal”.

The pop megastar has rarely spoken about politics, but she did quietly endorse Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election – and in the documentary Miss Americana, she voiced support for LGBT+ people. She has also urged her followers to vote, regardless of who they back.

Meanwhile, her boyfriend Kelce appeared in a public service ad about getting vaccinated against covid-19 and flu. These faint whiffs of liberalism and pro-science beliefs have earned the couple a spot at the centre of reactionary paranoia.

Conspiracy shills have accused Swift of rigging the Super Bowl and the 2024 presidential election, while secretly working as an asset for the Pentagon (hilariously, the Pentagon actually had to issue a formal denial).

At the same time, artificial intelligence-generated deepfakes showing Swift in pornographic scenarios have been spreading on social media (see page 14). The images created such an uproar that the US Congress immediately proposed a bill to stop non-consensual sexual depictions of real people created by AI. Executives at Meta have also promised that AI images will soon have warning labels on Facebook, Threads and Instagram. At this point, Swift might as well be a politician, given she is getting the same online abuse usually heaped on women running for office.

However, the subtext here isn’t that she is a clandestine political asset, it is that the US has entered a dangerous cultural moment, where some of its citizens cannot distinguish between entertainment and politics. Fandom, after all, can look very much like a social movement. From a distance, it is easy to confuse thousands of screaming Swifties with an insurrectionary force.

This is especially true right now, when online media has nuked the border between pop culture and political information. Twenty years ago, fandom existed in its own spaces – you could go to a concert, a game or a science fiction convention and nobody would start screaming about psy ops. Newspapers and magazines had separate sections for political news and sports news.

With fandom absorbed into social media communities, however, our feeds spew politics and entertainment information at us indiscriminately. To grab our attention in this information fire hose, political operatives are more likely to use the language of pop culture. As a result, people just looking for a happy musical distraction can’t find it. The right has turned Swift into a psy op that its followers are supposed to avoid.

Sadly, the US isn’t the only place where this kind of thing is happening. In 2020, the Chinese government blocked its citizens’ access to Archive of Our Own, an online repository of free “fanfiction” – stories written by fans set in the universes of their favourite shows, movies and sports teams. Why? Fans in China were fighting online over whether it was OK to represent a popular idol, Xiao Zhan, in fictional stories with LGBT+ themes. After the crackdown, an arena of public fun and creativity has been lost.

The Swift psy op discourse and fanfic censorship are examples of a profound cultural confusion that has impoverished our art and our politics. And, perhaps, it is a sign of something even more dangerous. Walter Benjamin, a philosopher who witnessed Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in Germany, warned that fascism thrives in an environment where politics is indistinguishable from aesthetics. Taylor Swift isn’t the psy op that endangers us. Instead, it is the political actors who use her as bait.

Annalee’s week

What I’m reading

Means of Control by Byron Tau, a history of high-tech surveillance in the US.

What I’m watching

Blue Eye Samurai, an animated series full of sword fighting and revenge.

What I’m working on

A novella about robots who make noodles.

Annalee Newitz is a science journalist and author. Their latest novel is The Terraformers and they are the co-host of the Hugo-winning podcast Our Opinions Are Correct. You can follow them
@annaleen and their website is techsploitation.com