#A service run from Latvia offers payment for short, social-media-friendly clips designed to look like grassroots GOP support.

By Ali Breland, The Atlantic. 

If you’re short on cash, there is someone in Riga, Latvia, who can help. “You can literally make 100k a month with this campaign,” a young man with blond curls and a thick accent says into a camera. All you have to do is post on social media video clips of “anything that supports Republican.” Unfamiliar with U.S. politics? No problem: “If you’re not from the USA, like, What the fuck is even Republicans? like me,” then simply go to Gemini or ChatGPT, he suggests, “and be like ‘Yo, Gemini, I want some videos promoting Republican values. Give me ideas.’ Go to Gemini. Get ideas. Boom.”

The man, who goes by Serviuos, is promoting a campaign called Elephant Clipping, run by his company, ClipIt. The company pays subcontractors, many from poorer countries in Eastern Europe and the global South, to chop up videos the company provides into bite-size pieces in the hope that the clips will go viral online.

Such “clipping” operations have become a popular means of manipulating people’s attention. Brands, influencers, musical artists, and others spend six-figure sums on such promotional campaigns. Perhaps inevitably, the practice is now moving into politics, often without the transparency required to know exactly what is being served up and by whom. Five months before the midterms, though, Serviuos is up-front about the goal of the Elephant Clipping campaign: “So that republican win in USA,” he writes in one message. I sent Serviuos a list of questions about his work in American right-wing politics. He wrote back, “Seems very out of context,” but didn’t comment further.

Many video-clipping services operate in relative secrecy so that the public isn’t aware of the manipulation of their social-media feeds. But the services also need to attract potential clippers. They typically rely on chat servers on Discord—an internet messaging app that was initially developed for gamers.

After an anonymous tipster flagged Elephant Clipping to me, I was able to access its Discord server and other related political-clipping campaign chats just by clicking “Join,” noting on a form that I was based in the United States, and answering some questions about my availability and desire to clip. Once I was in, I could see the mechanics of the campaign, which pays huge sums of money to people—many of whom appeared to be outside the U.S.—to push video clips from accounts designed to look like those of ordinary Americans spontaneously touting reasons to favor the GOP.

In one channel on the server, users can submit pro-Republican videos that they’ve already posted on TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts to be reviewed for payment. A separate Google Drive contains suggested videos for clippers to use, but “you can clip anything as long as it is positively framed conservative pro-Republican content,” Serviuos explains to participants. He provides some examples: a video of “Top 5 Joe Rogan moments,” a video of a conservative YouTuber confronting liberals with the suggested caption “See how Nick Shirley handles being told to ‘get the f* out’ of a public property.” Clippers are paid a proportionate share of the campaign’s monthly budget of $300,000. Every 1 million views yields a $300 payout.

The videos that result are not publicly visible in the Discord. Some clipper accounts on social media, however, inadvertently revealed their participation in the campaign by repeating the 258-word “Goal of the Campaign” instructions in the captions of some of their short videos. The Instagram account @_politicalhub, for example, posted the caption alongside a video of Charlie Kirk calling Palestine a “nonexistent place.” Another account called @frontrawpolitics posted the instructional text in the caption of a video of a conservative influencer saying that she would never marry a liberal, “because he’s going to raise my son to be a faggot.” Each video had only a single like, but both accounts had posted other videos, without the instructional caption, that collectively accrued tens of thousands of views.



Inside a Conservative Operation to Hijack Your Social-Media Feed