The red-to-blue disinformation pipeline
How the lies of an obscure Republican blogger were used by a Democratic congressional candidate and a national media outlet to falsely paint random social media users as Ron DeSantis operatives
During the 2022 and 2024 campaign seasons, false allegations circulated on various platforms that multiple Twitter users were secretly part of a coordinated pro-Ron DeSantis “social media army”. There is, however, no evidence to support most of the specific claims involved, and many of those accused of being part of the purported “army” have never expressed support for DeSantis; in fact, several of the targets of key accusations are left-leaning individuals.
Although these falsehoods wound up being spread mostly by Democrats, they had a very different genesis: a spammy and wildly misleading Substack blog titled “Misinformation, Disinformation, and Subterfuge” written by an obscure Republican hoaxer and serial harasser, Texas special education teacher Steven Jarvis. This article examines the origin and spread of three different components of the false “Ron DeSantis social media army” narrative.
The first component is an ever-evolving series of evidence-free false accusations that multiple people (including myself) have used a mysterious technical tool known as “the console”, which supposedly provides root-level access to all of X/Twitter’s systems, to ban various accounts on behalf of Ron DeSantis. The first use of the word “console” in a related context appears to be in an April 20th, 2022 Steven Jarvis blog post (“Post Mortem”), which falsely attributes both Jarvis’s own Twitter ban and that of another user to the alleged “console”; other suspended Twitter accounts soon joined the list of hypothetical “console” victims. Elements of this hoax also appeared on “Radicalized: Truth Survives” podcast cohost Jim Stewartson’s Substack blog around the same time.
By July 1st, 2022 (and possibly earlier), Jarvis’s tall tales regarding Twitter bans and magic consoles had made their way across the political aisle and onto then-Florida Democratic congressional candidate Rebekah Jones’s campaign and personal Facebook pages. Later that year, Jones included screenshots of several of Jarvis’s lies about Twitter suspensions as supporting evidence in a complaint she filed with the Florida Elections Commission. In December 2022, Jones’s @GeoRebekah Twitter account was reinstated, and shortly after, she began spreading several of Texas Republican Steven Jarvis’s falsehoods, including but not limited to the “console” conspiracy theory, to her over 300,000 (mostly Democratic) followers.
The second component of the false claims surrounding an alleged Ron DeSantis “social media army”: repeated and wildly inaccurate attempts to unmask the identities of the people running pseudonymous accounts accused of being part of said “army”. As with the “console” stories, most of these misidentifications (also known as faildoxxes) originally marinated on Republican hoaxer Steven Jarvis’s Substack blog, where some of them have been repeated sans evidence thousands of times. Contrary to the claims that the accounts and the humans falsely accused of operating them are part of an organized pro-DeSantis cyber operation, both the accounts and the misidentified people have widely varied political affinities, and many do not support DeSantis.
Several of these bogus identifications were laundered onto X/Twitter by former congressional candidate Rebekah Jones following her reinstatement in December 2022. In one instance, an April 2023 post by Jones falsely identifying a random Kokomo man as the operator of a pseudonymous pro-DeSantis social media account was retweeted thousands of times, and racked up over two million views. Despite being debunked by the Kokomo Tribune, the post, which was based on lies concocted on Steven Jarvis’s blog, is still online at the time of this writing, almost two years later.
The third and strangest component of the bogus “DeSantis social media army” narrative: a nonsensical claim that a StyleGAN-generated face from thispersondoesnotexist.com was a “sexual meme” depicting one of Steven Jarvis’s real children. This strange assertion appears to have originally been manufactured in conversations among Jarvis’s readers in late July 2022, including one discussion where podcaster Jim Stewartson replied “can confirm” to another commenter who asked if the GAN-generated face was an image of one of Jarvis’s kids. Jarvis himself began repeating this lie profusely on his Substack blog beginning in early August 2022.
In April 2023, The Daily Beast published the false claim that a GAN-generated face resembling a young boy was a “sexual meme” of one of Steven Jarvis’s daughters created by Ron DeSantis’s online operatives, along with a slew of other lies sourced from Jarvis’s blog. This Daily Beast article, penned by Jake Lahut, also falsely accused two people by Twitter handle (@KassandraSeven and myself, @conspirator0) of harassing Jarvis on behalf of DeSantis; in reality, both individuals oppose DeSantis, and both have been obsessively targeted by Jarvis with lies for roughly three years. The only correction issued thus far by Lahut or The Daily Beast has been to remove my (misspelled) handle from the article, and the refusal by either Lahut or his former editors to retract or address the remaining lies in any meaningful way shows a disturbing lapse of integrity from a profession ostensibly concerned with accurate information.
Although the Rebekah Jones congressional campaign drew to a close in November 2022, and Ron DeSantis dropped his bid for the presidency in January 2024, various lies connected to the “DeSantis social media army” narrative continue to surface here and there. Democrats duped by Jarvis and Jones continue to periodically fling false accusations of being DeSantis operatives at their fellow blue voters, and several of the people targeted have been placed on a deceptive Bluesky moderation list operated by Jones with the title “DeSantis apologists”. Similarly, the Daily Beast piece based on Steven Jarvis’s lies continues to be weaponized from time to time to falsely accuse people of crimes involving children.
As a final note, the article you are presently reading should not have been written by me, a social media researcher, so long after the fact. In a better journalistic world, the efforts to falsely paint random individuals as part of a nefarious pro-DeSantis troll farm would have been reported on contemporaneously by reporters covering the Jones and DeSantis campaigns. Instead, some of the falsehoods involved were themselves published as “news” by a national outlet, and the only accurate reporting on the topic in traditional media to date was done by a local education reporter in Kokomo.
Unfortunately, we exist in a media environment where virality is more effective than accuracy, and where outlets and reporters often lack the necessary understanding of social media manipulation to avoid being manipulated by hoaxers themselves. As long as this state of affairs remains unchanged, the saga of bullshit described in this article is unlikely to be the last of its kind.
Thank you for following through with this analysis. I think the timing is perfect, as a little hindsight goes a long way in this instance.
Thank you for writing this; it needed to be said. Hopefully more journos get their eyes and words on this.