BREAKING: Nicki Minaj’s MAGA social media empire built on army of 18,000 bots, explosive new report reveals
According to exclusive reporting by Politico, a bombshell new analysis has exposed what may be the most coordinated celebrity disinformation campaign in modern American politics — and it has Nicki Minaj’s name all over it.
Disinformation detection firm Cyabra identified a network of more than 18,000 fake accounts working in near-perfect coordination to artificially amplify Minaj’s conservative political content on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. The analysis covered activity from mid-November through late December of last year, a period during which Minaj was rapidly cementing herself as one of the Trump administration’s most high-profile celebrity allies.
The findings are staggering. Fake profiles made up 33 percent of all accounts evaluated in the study — a level of inauthentic activity typically seen during active war zones and presidential elections, not celebrity social media feeds. On one single day, December 26th, fake profiles accounted for 56 percent of all comments on Minaj’s political posts. For context, inauthentic accounts typically represent just 7 to 10 percent of organic social media discourse under normal conditions.
The coordinated bot activity wasn’t subtle. Researchers found that fake accounts flooded comment sections with “brief, repetitive, and low in semantic complexity” praise — particularly when real users were criticizing Minaj.
The bots deployed “highly similar language,” recycled positive hashtags, and in some cases posted longer, more elaborate comments designed to pass as genuine engagement. One fake account gushed about Minaj being “brave for living your truth” in language researchers flagged as artificial.
The purpose goes beyond simply making Minaj look popular. As University of Maryland computer science professor Jen Golbeck explained, bot interactions signal high engagement to social media algorithms, which then push the content to exponentially wider audiences far beyond Minaj’s existing follower base. The manufactured popularity becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy — and a powerful political weapon.
The report also found troubling overlap between accounts amplifying Minaj’s content and those amplifying Turning Point USA, the right-wing youth organization where Minaj made a high-profile appearance in December. Cyabra’s CEO noted that real human influencers were also “behaving the exact same way” as the bots — riding coordinated narrative waves in patterns consistent with a professionally run political influence campaign.
None of this happened in a vacuum. Trump personally invited Minaj on stage at his Treasury Department summit last month, lavishing her with praise and recording a TikTok with her afterward. Conservative influencers with large followings amplified her every post. And behind the scenes, thousands of fake accounts ensured her content reached millions of eyeballs it never would have reached organically.
Governor Newsom’s office, whose boss was one of Minaj’s most frequent targets during the analysis period, did not hold back. “Like most MAGA mouthpieces, we are not surprised Nicki Minaj needs bots to stay relevant,” a spokesperson said.
The deeper story here isn’t really about Nicki Minaj. It’s about a political movement that has become so dependent on manufactured consensus, artificial amplification, and coordinated deception that it can no longer tell the difference between genuine popularity and a well-funded bot network. The MAGA machine didn’t just recruit a celebrity.
It built her an army of ghosts to make her seem unstoppable — and hoped no one would notice.
Someone noticed.