Documents, deleted posts and one very public apology: the pay-to-post business keeps getting caught — and the paper trail now has names on it.
Every feed has them: the comedy account that suddenly cares about a Senate race, the cooking channel with a sudden passion for farm policy. The question hanging over political social media is no longer whether some of those opinions are bought. It is how often — and the receipts keep surfacing.
Start with the documents. Newly surfaced records show that more than 500 social media creators took part in a covert electioneering effort by Democratic donors to shape the presidential election for Kamala Harris, per a guest column by journalist Lee Fang. The payments did not just go to political accounts. They went to people known for comedy posts, travel vlogs and cooking videos — in exchange, per Fang’s reporting, for “positive, specific pro-Kamala content” designed to create the appearance of a groundswell of support. What viewers saw looked organic. What it was, was a buy.
The right has its own receipts, and one of its schemes collapsed in public. When influencers began posting strikingly similar messages against Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.‘s push to remove sugary soda from SNAP food benefits — some posing with pictures of President Trump enjoying Coca-Cola — right-leaning reporter Nick Sortor lined the posts up side by side. The money trail, per Fang’s account, pointed to offers made to creators to denounce the soda rules as government overreach. Posts came down. At least one influencer apologized in public: “That was dumb of me. Massive egg on my face. In all seriousness, it won’t happen again.”
Then there is the case that ended in a federal indictment. Tenet Media, the company that paid a roster of right-wing commentators, shut down in September 2024 after prosecutors alleged its money came from Russian state media employees. The commentators say they were deceived and kept editorial control — a defense that underlines the structural problem: in this business, even the talent may not know whose money is talking.
It is still happening at the local level, in real time. This month, a Miami New Times investigation raised questions about the influencers promoting a Virginia Key marina referendum — a political committee funded by Suntex, the company that stands to benefit from the deal, put roughly $1.5 million into the campaign, and an analysis by Political Cortadito of posts by three specific “paid actors” found them attacking marina operator Aabad Melwani with vile, racist and antisemitic posts and smearing an opposing restaurant owner as running an “antifa headquarters.” None of it read like advertising. That is the point.
And the claims keep coming from inside the house. Former insider Ashley St. Clair has alleged — and it remains her allegation — that a MAGA pay-to-play machine coordinates paid influencer messaging from the shadows. Her claims are unproven. But they land in an environment where the proven cases already include secret contracts, identical scripts and at least one tearful apology tour.
So what is the defense? Fang’s column states it plainly: the influencers, in most of these cases, “didn’t break any rules — because none exist.” Federal law requires a “paid for by” line on a TV ad. It does not require your favorite creator to tell you a campaign, a committee or a foreign government wrote the check behind their opinion. The hacks are not hiding from the law. They are standing in the hole where the law should be.
The 247 Take — A bought opinion is not illegal, and a paid post is not automatically a lie. But when the money is secret, the audience is the product being fooled — and every new set of receipts makes the whole feed smell a little more like an ad nobody labeled.
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Sources: Lee Fang via PageSuite (the 500-creator documents and the SNAP soda scheme) | Political Cortadito (the Miami New Times referendum investigation) | Fight the Future (the Tenet Media record)
