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Nick Fuentes’ Failed “Groyper War” Against Trump Was a Blatant Attempt at Platform Manipulation 

New research shows how a fizzled white-nationalist influence campaign could usher in more successful efforts.

 

Anna Merlan

Nick Fuentes is a white supremacist, an antisemite, a misogynist, and a lunkish weirdo so radioactive that even the Trump campaign doesn’t want to have anything to do with him. Earlier this summer Fuentes, 26, exercised his growing disenchantment with Trump by rallying his fanbase of similarly trollish and aggrieved young men, the so-called “groypers,” to do his will against the campaign.

New research from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank that studies online extremism, shows how Fuentes mounted what he called a “groyper war” against the Trump campaign on Twitter and TruthSocial. “The tactics Fuentes and his fans used were pretty crude,” says Jared Holt, a senior researcher at ISD studying hate and extremism. But “more serious actors” seeking to sway the election, he adds, including “countries that would seek to influence political discourse in the US for their own agendas may well look at this and see a bit of a blueprint.”

Fuentes is among a group of far-right figures, including Candace Owens and Laura Loomer, who have argued that the Trump campaign needs to take a more extreme stance on immigration. That was one demand of this social media campaign, alongside extracting a commitment from Trump to not go to war with Iran, an extension of Fuentes’ stated “America First” views and his disdain for Israel, which he’s called “a terrorist nation with nukes holding America hostage.” Fuentes also called on Trump to fire campaign managers Christopher LaCivita and Susie Wiles; he’s called LaCivita “lame” and complained he encourages Trump to talk about the economy, which it’s fair to surmise Fuentes finds less salient a topic than immigration and deportation and more boring than the racism, weird grudges, and stories about windmills with which Trump otherwise fills his rallies.

This isn’t the first time Fuentes has grandiously deployed the term “Groyper war.” In 2019, he used it to describe his fans storming in-person events featuring Rep. Dan Crenshaw, Charlie Kirk, and Donald Trump Jr, rattling the Republican figures with heckling questions. This summer’s digital effort was fairly simple: he wanted people to sign up en masse for TruthSocial to yell at the campaign, and get certain topics and keywords trending on Twitter.

His fans followed those instructions well. Holt found that when Fuentes directed livestream viewers to use certain phrases on Twitter, like “FIRE LACIVITA” and “NO WAR WITH IRAN” those phrases showed “clear spikes,” with groypers creating “thousands of posts—often within just a few minutes—after which usage of the phrases steeply dropped.” 

Fuentes also encouraged his fans to sign up for TruthSocial to push similar messaging, Holt found—and they obliged, creating accounts in the thousands. 

“Check the scoreboard,” one alleged Groyper tweeted. “We’re just getting started,” as they shared a graphic that claimed a victory in Corey Lewandowski rejoining the Trump campaign in August and LaCivita and Wiles purportedly being “demoted,” painting it as a concession to the Groypers’ demand. The same graphic bragged about how the “Groyper war” had attracted media attention, and that JD Vance had been asked about Nick Fuentes. (Vance answered the question by calling him “a total loser.”)

But in the real world, Trump didn’t fire LaCivita or Wiles. Nor did he rule out going to war with Iran or change his tune on funding for Israel or any of Fuentes’ other current fixations. On August 26, Holt wrote in his analysis, “Fuentes appeared to concede that their efforts on social media had ultimately been unsuccessful.”

According to Holt, Fuentes declared, “They didn’t hear us on Twitter. They didn’t hear us on Truth Social. They just censored the hashtags. They didn’t hear us when we emailed them. And they didn’t hear us when The Washington Post and every other news media outlet reported it. So, now we’re going to travel to Michigan, and we will say it to their faces with a crowd of actual America Firsters.” On September 4, he again declared on Twitter that he was “heading out to Michigan next week” to continue the fight. On September 14, he said that he and the Groypers would soon be “live from Michigan,” dubbing it “Groyper war two,” adding: “We are going to hit them in real life.” Whatever Fuentes envisions in Michigan, it hasn’t yet materialized.

Holt says Fuentes aimed a bit high, and that it was too much to hope “to get a national presidential campaign to suddenly clean house by firing top campaign managers and crafting their message around some racist podcaster’s wishes.” While Fuentes was once invited to dine with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, alongside Kanye West, and has lately gained some purchase among mainstream Republican crowds, Holt says Fuentes’ failed “War” illustrates that Trump now believes he has “nothing in particular to gain from associating with him and his odious fanbase.”

That said, Fuentes’ overt attempt to push certain messages on Twitter and TruthSocial, in violation of Twitter’s policies against platform manipulation and spam, Holt said, could encourage more sophisticated players to try to manipulate the platforms, since neither has signaled a particular interest in punishing such behavior.

It also, he adds, could show the social media platforms—if they cared to look—what enforcement actions remain to be taken. Given that TruthSocial is Trump’s own platform and that he hasn’t ever purported to care about platform manipulation, and given Elon Musks decimation of Twitter’s trust and safety teams, his exuberant embrace of extremism and conspiracy theories, and his own massive role in spreading disinformation on Twitter, in this case that seems unlikely.  

“These are private companies at the end of the day,” Holt says, with a note of exhaustion. “It’s up to them if they want to enforce on it.”