Earlier this summer, YouTuber Kjersti Flaa — the ex-entertainment journalist who, two years ago, released a viral interview clip in which the actress Blake Lively appeared to respond rudely to congratulations on her pregnancy — published a new video titled “It’s ALL Coming OUT NOW!!” The YouTube thumbnail featured the word “BUSTED!?!” in all caps and a photo of Lively and her husband, actor Ryan Reynolds, both looking menacing.
Flaa releasing new content about Lively was no surprise. For the last year and a half, she has devoted her channel almost exclusively to covering the actress’s litigation with actor/director Justin Baldoni, churning out hundreds of videos that are sharply critical of Lively and supportive of Baldoni.
Yet this particular video went beyond Flaa’s usual fare, which — like that of most creators in the online ecosystem surrounding the Lively v. Baldoni case — regularly depicts Lively as an entitled, oversensitive manipulator and praises Baldoni for his integrity and fortitude. Now, Flaa announced, she was able to reveal something even more sinister about Lively: it was actually she and Reynolds who had engaged content creators to smear Baldoni’s reputation, a purported revelation that turned the actress’s allegation of an online smear campaign against her on its head.
Rattling through a list of the (relatively few) digital creators who discuss the litigation from a perspective sympathetic to Lively, Flaa noted facts she deemed suspicious, such as Reynolds following some of the creators’ accounts on social media. She was also careful to credit her source for those facts, a popular post that had recently appeared in the Reddit community r/ItEndsWithLawsuits. “Very interesting stuff,” she said, thanking the audience member who had sent her the Reddit post. “And thank you again to firstwepour-roses,” the username of the post’s author, “because this is pretty eye-opening if you ask me.”
Taken at face value, it seemed like an instance of a grassroots Internet “sleuth,” a term ubiquitous in Lively v. Baldoni online discourse, whose research first gained traction on Reddit and was then further amplified by a creator with a large platform. (Flaa boasts nearly 300,000 subscribers on YouTube.)
But the truth was more complicated.
Firstwepour-roses is part of a cluster of six Reddit accounts that have been identified, with an unusually high degree of certainty, as a “sock puppet” network: a set of accounts run by the same person or group that coordinate to shape dialogue and seed narratives on social media (a practice known as astroturfing). Over the past year and a half, these six Reddit accounts have worked to influence discourse around the Lively v. Baldoni case.
Lively, as some may recall, alleged in a December 2024 lawsuit that Baldoni had sexually harassed her during filming of the movie It Ends With Us and then hired a PR team to discredit her via a negative online campaign in case she went public with her allegations. The two settled her case in May 2026.
Engaging primarily (but not exclusively) on r/ItEndsWithLawsuits — the largest Reddit community devoted to the Lively v. Baldoni litigation — these six accounts have relentlessly seeded and promoted certain messages and themes, including the claim that Lively and her supporters are racist. They have recycled posts, comments, and language, replying to each other in a way that shapes and redirects discussion. They have mocked, castigated, and lobbed accusations at fellow Reddit users, other online communities, and digital creators who support Lively, sometimes encouraging their audience to pursue these users and digital creators to other, non-Reddit, platforms. And they have, at times, appeared to anticipate key developments in the litigation, laying the groundwork for how those events will be discussed online before they occur.
To date, these accounts have created over 443 posts and 7,701 comments about the Lively v. Baldoni case.*
Of course, this lawsuit inspires strong emotions in many unquestionably-authentic social media users — people emboldened from behind a screen to express their opinions on the case and its key players passionately and prolifically. Could these six accounts, similarly, be run by someone unconnected to the case who simply took their Reddit addiction too far?
Perhaps. It remains unconfirmed who operates these accounts or what their motivation is. However, one fact casts doubt on the possibility that they’re merely the product of an overzealous fan. For the last two years, all six accounts have been engaged in exactly the same behavior (e.g., promoting engagement in a specific Reddit community, seeding narratives, shaping the direction of conversations) on a topic entirely unrelated to Lively v. Baldoni: the hit 2000s rock band The Fray. Six interconnected accounts posting obsessively and purposefully on one entertainment industry topic might just be a fan; the same cluster doing the same thing on two such topics seems more like a business.
Along with other evidence of the accounts’ inauthenticity, this suggests that whoever is behind these accounts may, in fact, be engaging on Reddit professionally. And the prospect of professional, coordinated networks of users seeding and shaping narratives on Reddit raises larger questions: not only about the implications for Lively’s allegations, but also about the prevalence of these kinds of astroturfing tactics on social media more broadly, and what that would mean in areas like politics. It also suggests the need for a public conversation about, and further investigation into, how widespread this problem really is — and how platforms, tech companies, regulatory bodies, and concerned consumers should respond — as Reddit, in particular, increasingly shapes how we digest online information in the age of AI.
A Distinct Cluster — With a Common Operator
To identify the cluster of accounts examined in this article, researchers used a purpose-built tool that compares user activity across different Reddit communities (known as subreddits or “subs”). Among other functions, this tool makes it possible to discover groups of users on large subreddits, such as r/ItEndsWithLawsuits (64.5K members), who also engage together on much smaller, niche subreddits like r/TheFray (1.6K members), a possible sign of coordinated activity among those accounts. After pulling the list of accounts common to r/ItEndsWithLawsuits and r/TheFray, the researchers compared those accounts’ histories using the same tool, seeking more indicators of commonality. This ended up flagging the six accounts in question.
While each individual account is active on a range of subs, and there are numerous subs where multiple of the accounts are active, the analysis showed only five subs on which all six accounts have engaged. Four of those subs focus on the Lively v. Baldoni litigation, and the fifth focuses on the band The Fray.
Further cross-referencing revealed that the accounts consistently reply to each other’s posts. Specifically, each of the six accounts has commented on multiple posts made by every one of the other five accounts. Across three subreddits — r/TheFray, r/ItEndsWithLawsuits and r/teamjustinbaldoni — the six accounts commented on each other’s posts 966 times.
The six accounts go by the following usernames** (the “u/” is a Reddit convention that stands for “user”):
u/DearKaleidoscope2
u/InnerWishbone6154
u/SunnyWays8
u/TheClassic_Star
u/TheWickedUrn
u/firstwepour-roses
Duplicate content
There is little question that these accounts are operated either by the same person or by a group of people with access to the same draft copy. Throughout their time on Reddit, they have frequently shared identical blocks of text, links, or screenshots across different threads, sometimes within minutes of each other.
For instance, on March 29, 2025, TheClassic_Star and TheWickedUrn made almost exactly the same comment in r/TheFray, 11 minutes apart:
Likewise, on September 16, 2024, u/TheClassic_Star and u/SunnyWays8 made posts a few hours apart — on r/dating_advice and r/relationships, respectively — with largely identical text, save for the titles and some minor language variation in the bodies. (These kinds of small changes are often made to avoid triggering Reddit’s spam filters when posting the same content multiple times.) The posts were seemingly part of the accounts’ “karma-farming” efforts (discussed below).
The accounts have also duplicated each other’s posts and comments regarding the Lively v. Baldoni litigation. In one instance, u/TheWickedUrn and u/DearKaleidoscope2 made nearly identical posts in two different subreddits — r/ItEndsWithLawsuits and r/teamjustinbaldoni — only 16 minutes apart.
In another instance, DearKaleidoscope2 made a post in r/ItEndsWithLawsuits titled, “Does Alex Saks remember anything? I don’t recall and I don’t remember.” Two months later, SunnyWays8 made a post in the same sub with very similar text but a different title: “Blake Lively’s star witness, Alex Saks, can’t remember anything.”
Additional examples include
TheWickedUrn and SunnyWays8 made nearly identical weight loss posts 11 minutes apart.
DearKaleidoscope2 and InnerWishbone6154 made identical comments in r/popculture and r/JustinBaldoni, just three hours apart.
DearKaleidoscope2 and firstwepour-roses made posts with the same title three days apart in r/ItEndsWithLawsuits
SunnyWays8 and firstwepour-roses made comments on a post in r/canada that included identical sentences, one day apart.
Concurrent activity
What’s more, all six accounts show synchronized timing of activity on Reddit, with each account’s activity dropping to zero or near zero between 08:00 UTC and 13:00 UTC (4am to 9am EDT). Likewise, all six accounts’ activity tends to peak from 16:00 UTC to 23:00 UTC (12pm to 7pm EDT). Even the smaller spikes and dips throughout the day generally look similar across the different accounts. The chances of this happening with unconnected accounts operated by different people are almost infinitesimally small.
All six accounts were created within the last five years. Three of them (InnerWishbone6154, TheClassic_Star, and SunnyWays8) started commenting on the Lively v. Baldoni litigation on January 31, 2025, the day before Baldoni’s team launched a website with a “timeline of relevant events” narrating his version of the facts of the case. The other three all began posting about the litigation between December 23, 2024 and February 3, 2025. A few months earlier, between June 18, 2024 and September 27, 2024, they had all begun engaging in r/TheFray, during a period when the relaunched band was contending with fan backlash.
From FreeKarma4You to “I (a Black woman)”
The accounts’ histories suggest they are not only operated by the same person or group, but also inauthentic, meaning they were likely created specifically for astroturfing.
Getting established
Newly-created inauthentic accounts tend to display a unique sense of urgency to get “established” on Reddit so they can begin to fulfill their purpose. In order to bypass Reddit’s spam filters, appear credible, and gain permission to post on certain subreddits, they must rapidly accumulate “karma,” or upvotes (roughly equivalent to “likes” on other social media platforms). To do so, they engage in “karma farming,” which has historically involved making emotional or conflict-laden posts designed to attract engagement — thus boosting visibility in the algorithm — in high-traffic subs like r/AITAH or r/relationship_advice. Four of the six accounts featured in this article made early-in-their-existence posts that fit this description. (The other two ramped up more gradually.)
These efforts are sometimes supplemented by soliciting upvotes on subs created solely to facilitate such vote exchanges. For instance, u/TheClassic_Star began its lifecycle by doing just that in a sub called r/FreeKarma4You, a 500K-subscriber community that was banned by Reddit last year for violating the platform’s vote manipulation policies.
A few months after they began engaging in r/FreeKarma4You, TheClassic_Star’s second-ever Reddit post received over 3,000 upvotes.
Because the goal of an inauthentic account at this stage of its lifecycle is karma-accumulation, rather than crafting a consistent persona, the accounts’ early posts often include conflicting personal details. This is visible in the above screenshot of TheClassic_Star’s first few posts, in which they variously claim to be 23, 24, 25, almost 34, and 26.
Likewise, in August of 2023, DearKaleidoscope2 claimed three different ages in three different posts — one of which gained nearly 1,000 upvotes — within a 48-hour window.
Some of the accounts’ profile pages suggest they were created using another account’s template, often an indicator of inauthenticity. In one of the more glaring examples of this, DearKaleidoscope2’s profile page features the name of another account in the cluster, TheClassic_Star (with an “e” at the end).
Honing personas
The accounts seem to have refined or evolved their personas in similar ways as they began their apparent astroturfing work. When they first joined Reddit in 2022, TheWickedUrn’s profile featured a white avatar, but around the time the accounts began commenting on the Lively v. Baldoni dispute in early 2025, they swapped that for a Black avatar. During the same period, InnerWishbone6154 selected a similar Black-appearing avatar (they previously had no avatar, which is Reddit’s default option) with the same hairstyle.
These avatar choices reflect something much more interesting about, and fundamental to, the accounts’ personas: as of early 2025, all six claim to be Black women.
The true identity of whoever operates the accounts is, of course, unclear. But it is worth noting the long history of online trolling operations and influence campaigns — from 4chan and Gamergate to the Kremlin-backed Internet Research Agency — falsely claiming Black identities for their own purposes. It is also worth noting that race and racism are frequent themes in online discussions of the Lively v. Baldoni litigation, even though Lively and Baldoni are both white.
It Ends With Astroturfing
The subreddit r/ItEndsWithLawsuits was created on January 23, 2025, one week after Baldoni filed a countersuit against Lively for defamation and extortion. (He alleged that she had made false sexual harassment complaints to wrest creative control of It Ends With Us from him. His claims were dismissed by a federal judge in June of 2025, with Lively later awarded just over $400,000 in attorneys’ fees and costs for her defense, substantially less than the $8 million she had requested.)
The sub’s founder, a Redditor who went by the username u/Fresh_Statistician80, described its raison d’etre as “nuanced discussion” of the Lively v. Baldoni litigation “based on facts and evidence.” Members would be required to “apply critical thinking and analysis and refrain from accusing anyone that doesn’t agree with you of: 1. Being a bot 2. Being a part of the smear campaign 3. Being a part of the retaliation efforts 4. Utilizing DARVO [Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender] 5. Only having that opinion because they have been influenced by bots or the smear campaign.” (Fresh_Statistician80 stopped engaging on Reddit in April 2025 and later deleted their account.)
The sub grew rapidly over the next 18 months, becoming a kind of wellspring for online coverage of the Lively v. Baldoni litigation that was frequently mined for content by digital creators and press outlets. Today, it boasts over 60,000 members and recently peaked at 500,000 weekly visitors, even as other subs devoted to the case have seen their engagement fall off post-settlement. Its content regularly draws thousands of upvotes, thereby finding its way into the feeds of Reddit users who don’t follow it.
A snapshot of r/ItEndsWithLawsuits on April 30, 2025. Posts sorted by “best.”
Repetitive language and recurring messages
In the months following r/ItEndsWithLawsuits’ January 2025 creation, the six accounts on which this article focuses became frequent posters and commenters. They made certain points repeatedly, often using the exact same language over and over.
One of their recurring messages was that when Baldoni released footage of a moment during filming when he had allegedly made Lively uncomfortable, Lively’s claims were (as the accounts insisted) exposed as lies and people no longer believed her. The footage had been sent to tabloids and content creators shortly after Baldoni filed his countersuit, though the litigation had not yet reached the discovery phase where parties exchange evidence. During the scene, Lively’s and Baldoni’s characters were supposed to slow dance in a bar; Lively alleged, among other things, that Baldoni tried to improvise a kiss without discussing it beforehand or seeking her consent, a claim some viewers interpreted the footage as substantiating, though others did not.
During an early status conference for the case, the presiding judge, Lewis Liman, granted a request by Lively’s attorneys to enforce a New York rule of professional conduct that forbids attorneys from doing or saying anything that might prejudice a jury pool. He confirmed that this meant no more early releases of evidence to the press. In the following months, the accounts frequently referenced an interview with Baldoni’s attorney, Bryan Freedman, in which Freedman claimed that Baldoni had asked him not to release even more damning evidence out of concern for Lively’s wellbeing.
The accounts frequently quoted Judge Liman as calling the litigation “a feud between PR firms,” citing the phrase to underscore one of their core messages: that Lively is guilty of PR dirty tricks, and that both sides are using the litigation to sell their narratives in the court of public opinion. (Liman’s use of the “feud between PR firms” phrase was in reference to the related Jones v. Abel lawsuit, in which Baldoni’s former publicist is suing him and his current publicists.)
Switching hats
As the above examples illustrate, the accounts regularly positioned themselves as authorities on the Lively v. Baldoni case, even insiders. But as the litigation unfolded, they occasionally assumed the role of newcomer, purporting to have just discovered the case and inviting other users to fill them in or respond to their initial reaction. (This is a common strategy for fostering engagement on subreddits that focus deeply on a single topic.)
The accounts sometimes switched hats in other ways. Shortly after Baldoni’s countersuit was dismissed in June of 2025, TheWickedUrn made a post on r/ItEndsWithLawsuits titled “My unpopular opinions (Team Lively).” Purporting sincerely to align with “Team Lively” (Lively v. Baldoni online discourse often refers to “teams” backing each camp) marked a stark departure from TheWickedUrn’s previous content, which in multiple instances had sarcastically mocked the actress and her supporters for their alleged sanctimony and illogic.
The post touched on several of the accounts’ recurring themes and messages — harshly criticizing a pro-Lively content creator; calling out racism from Lively and feminists who support her (citing the poster’s own experience “as a Black woman who has been on the receiving end of microaggressions”); describing Lively and Reynolds as “entitled, privileged, performative, and fake” — albeit this time from the proverbial other side of the aisle. It received positive engagement and upvotes from the r/ItEndsWithLawsuits community, with many commenters who identified as Team Baldoni congratulating the poster on their willingness to criticize their own “team” and find common ground with the other side.
While the six accounts are generally prone to deleting their posts after a few weeks or more, they tend to delete these kinds of “hat-switching” posts especially often and sooner after posting.
A focus on race
Race and racism have been prominent themes in the accounts’ commentary on Lively v. Baldoni.
One persistent criticism of Lively, which she alleges was resurrected and promoted by a negative digital campaign that began in August of 2024, involved the venue of her wedding to Ryan Reynolds: In 2012, the couple married on the site of a South Carolina plantation that was built on and exploited the labor of enslaved people before the Civil War. (Lively and Reynolds publicly apologized for this during the 2020 racial reckoning following George Floyd’s murder, saying they had privately regretted their choice of venue years earlier, so much so that they redid their ceremony elsewhere.)
Starting in early 2025, discourse around the lawsuit re-upped this criticism, with Baldoni’s supporters frequently citing Lively’s 2012 “plantation wedding” as a reason social media had spontaneously exploded with dislike for her during the 2024 premiere of “It Ends With Us,” without any intervention from Baldoni’s team.
The six accounts have frequently repeated the phrase “plantation wedding,” along with recurring references to Lively as a “white woman” supported by other “white feminists” whose frivolous grievances, they say, make a mockery of Black women’s much graver concerns. They have also focused heavily on Jamey Heath, a producer on It Ends With Us and CEO of Baldoni’s company, who is a party to the lawsuit and participated in some of the incidents that Lively alleges were harassment. While Baldoni is white, Heath is Black.
A number of the accounts’ comments — many using very similar language — ridicule the concern that witnessing the backlash against Lively will dissuade other women from coming forward about harassment, sardonically characterizing it as “white women will now be afraid to report crimes involving Black people”:
Likewise, in August of 2025, firstwepour-roses made a post on the sub r/blackladies claiming to be a student who had recently learned about the case in class. (A year earlier, this user claimed to have completed their college studies.) They expressed frustration that “the White Girls in my class…said that more women (especially women of colour) need to support Blake Lively,” since these classmates didn’t understand how much worse the workplace can be for Black women:
The accounts have also fended off arguments that Baldoni himself has made race-related missteps, which some Lively supporters cite as evidence of a double standard. For instance, they leveraged their personas as Black women to challenge the claims of a Black former employee of Baldoni’s company who filed a racial discrimination lawsuit against the company in 2021. In posts made almost two months apart, DearKaleidoscope2 and SunnyWays8 used the same images and much of the same language to argue that the man, who had produced Baldoni’s podcast, could not have experienced truly harmful conduct at Baldoni’s hands, since he included a photo of Baldoni on his professional portfolio website (which the accounts described as his “personal website”):
Confronting opposing voices
Another central theme of the six accounts’ posts and comments has been harsh criticism of pro-Lively online voices, on Reddit and beyond.
For instance, in 20 highly repetitive comments across multiple threads, they referenced a “warning list” of pro-Lively users on r/ItEndsWithLawsuits whom they said other sub members should avoid or even block. They variously described these users as “troll accounts,” “suspicious accounts,” and “compromised accounts,” sometimes confronting them directly with these accusations:
(The authors of this article have confirmed that the pro-Lively accounts being targeted in the above graphic are authentic Reddit users. Most are still active but stopped engaging on r/ItEndsWithLawsuits.)
The accounts have also displayed a seemingly outsized focus on the relatively few pro-Lively online creators. Dozens of their posts and comments have featured screenshots of these creators’ profiles on Instagram/Threads, TikTok, and Twitter, which the creators say have prompted spikes in negativity directed towards them on those platforms, sometimes escalating to full-fledged harassment.
For instance, in a post titled “Are bots being used to attack feminists?,” InnerWishbone6154 shared a screenshot of a comment in which one TikToker (who is no longer active on TikTok) discussed the impersonation of Black women to sow division within feminist movements. The TikToker had wondered whether some of the “no followers, no pfp [profile picture]” accounts responding hostilely in her comments section while claiming to be Black were, in fact, “blackfishing” — pretending to be Black online:
In the comments on the Reddit post, users expressed outrage at the woman’s speculation. “Holy shit, this is a disgusting claim to make and a new low for Sarah,” the most-upvoted comment read. “So the Black women who are critiquing Blake are lying about their identity, got it.” Another upvoted commenter suggested that the TikToker would regret being called out, deservedly so: “[S]he knows she shouldn’t post about it because she’ll get backlash and she was hoping that somebody wouldn’t see this comment.”
Likewise, in two different posts featuring the same image and recycled language, TheWickedUrn and TheClassic_Star posted a screenshot of another pro-Lively creator’s Twitter handle, in the context of sharing a Tweet from a woman who had defended him by calling his critics “misogynist whores.” Both posts suggested that pro-Lively creators and social media users, as a whole, were so offensive that their arguments should not be taken seriously.
Inauthentic users, authentic insiders? Signs the accounts had advance information on Lively v. Baldoni
Most of the Lively v. Baldoni information the accounts have shared over the last 18 months was public when they shared it — albeit often would have taken some digging to find — or has consisted of rumors and theories they started or amplified. At times, though, they have seemed to possess some premonition (or insider knowledge) of what was about to happen.
For instance, at 10:30pm EST on January 30, 2025, DearKaleidoscope2 commented on r/JustinBaldoni expressing frustration that Lively’s complaint made it “difficult to establish a timeline” of the events at issue in the case:
Earlier that day, they had made an entire post airing some of the same criticisms of Lively’s “vague” complaint, describing it as suspiciously lacking in journalistic fundamentals — who, what, when, where and why:
Baldoni had already filed his original countersuit on January 16, and it was not public knowledge that he would soon amend it. No one on Baldoni’s team had publicly mentioned the possibility of publishing a timeline — the closest such statement was his attorney’s assertion earlier that month that they were “releasing all of the evidence” — and the need for a timeline, specifically, had not been a widespread topic of online discussion. Yet the day after DearKaleidoscope2’s comments criticizing the absence of a timeline in Lively’s complaint, Baldoni filed an amended complaint that attached a 168-page “timeline of relevant events” spanning January 2019 to January 2025, with accompanying screenshots of texts to support his narrative. (Judge Liman later commented on the exhibit’s procedural impropriety, noting “you can’t just attach a factual narrative” and asking “what is the purpose of that attachment?”) The following day, Baldoni launched a website, thelawsuitinfo.com, to host the timeline for easier public access.
In short, the accounts’ efforts to seed the notion that a timeline was needed — and that whichever party offered a longer, more detailed timeline should be considered more credible — were ideally timed if they did know Baldoni’s website launch was imminent.
Another instance of potential foreknowledge requires a bit more context. In September 2025, Lively filed a sworn affidavit from an anonymous declarant whose name was redacted — later revealed to be filmmaker Claire Ayoub — alleging verbal abuse by Baldoni and explaining the declarant’s connection to an accompanying exhibit, also sealed. The exhibit was later revealed to be an audio recording of an August 2024 call between Ayoub and Steve Sarowitz, the billionaire Paylocity founder and backer of Baldoni’s company, who is also a party to the lawsuit. Lively’s team filed the recording and accompanying declaration, both of which were attached to a motion for attorneys’ fees, to support their contention that Baldoni, Sarowitz, and others had countersued Lively with retaliatory intent. Lively had previously alleged that Sarowitz vowed to “protect the studio like Israel protected itself from Hamas” and stated there would be “two dead bodies when I’m done,” referring to Lively and Reynolds.
In early October, Judge Liman ordered the declaration and accompanying exhibit unsealed, confirming that the latter was an audio recording. Putting two and two together, online followers of the case surmised that the recording must have been attached as proof Sarowitz made the “dead bodies” statement. Yet, as everyone waited for the unsealed recording to become public, some Baldoni supporters were skeptical. After all, Baldoni had previously alleged that Lively’s evidence was “cherrypicked” and “spliced” to convey defamatory lies. And it was Baldoni’s side that had asked for the recording to be unsealed, while Lively had wanted it (along with Ayoub’s identity) to remain hidden from the public. Wasn’t it likelier that the full recording would expose Lively’s allegations about what Sarowitz said as more lies?
In the days leading up to the recording’s release, the accounts worked to redirect that conversation. TheWickedUrn resurfaced an interview with Sarowitz in which he spoke of a moral calling to protect his businesses from harm. SunnyWays8 made two separate posts about the upcoming release of Ayoub’s recording, both suggesting it was wrong for her to record Sarowitz without his knowledge. (This became the dominant issue in online discussions about Ayoub and the recording, with users supportive of Baldoni labeling Ayoub as “no consent Claire” — seemingly the result of a successful effort to change the narrative.) And on October 20, roughly 10 hours before the recording was posted to r/ItEndsWithLawsuits, firstwepour-roses made a post asking, “If the audio confirms Sarowitz’s intent to retaliate, will that shift your stance?”
After being teed up in the comments by another account, firstwepour-roses answered their own question. They argued that if the recording confirmed the “dead bodies” quote, that would merely mean Sarowitz was fighting back against Lively’s and Reynolds’ aggression, especially if it turned out he had made the statements after the couple’s representatives allegedly warned the “gloves would come off” if Baldoni didn’t publicly apologize for his conduct. (The date of the recording had not yet been revealed at the time.)
Upon its release, the recording confirmed both that Sarowitz had, indeed, made the statements as alleged and — based on the date — that he made them after the alleged “gloves will come off” call, just as the accounts seemingly anticipated.
Into the Fray
Readers may remember The Fray from the band’s 2005 breakout hit “How to Save a Life” (featured in the album of the same name), which went multi-platinum and became the unofficial theme song of the TV show Grey’s Anatomy. Despite its splashy mid-2000s success, the band’s follow-up albums met with more tepid reception over the next decade and a half, and after a hiatus, lead singer Isaac Slade announced his formal departure in 2022. The rest of the band decided to continue without Slade, tapping guitarist Joe King as their new lead singer and recording new music. But when the relaunched band released its first EP in 2024, reviews were lukewarm, and fans had mixed reactions to the new lineup.
It was in this context that the six Reddit accounts began engaging on r/TheFray, the band’s official fan subreddit, in the summer of 2024. Over the next 22 months, they made a total of at least 256 posts and 1,107 comments on the sub.
While objectively large, these numbers pale in comparison to the volume of their posts and comments about Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni. This is unsurprising. After all, r/TheFray is a tiny sub compared to r/ItEndsWithLawsuits and other subs that focus on the Lively v. Baldoni litigation: it currently has only 1.6K members and often goes days between posts.
Changing (and sometimes dominating) the conversation on r/TheFray
The accounts’ participation in r/TheFray, as compared to r/ItEndsWithLawsuits and related subs, has also followed less of a clear chronological arc, which is likewise unsurprising given the absence of ongoing litigation to narrate. Still, their arrival correlated with a stark shift in the sub’s engagement level and in the nature of the discussions that took place there.
Prior to the summer of 2024, most posts on r/TheFray focused on the band’s music and history, sharing rare memorabilia or analyzing song lyrics, with much of the conversation still geared toward the mid-2000s heyday. This was true even as news of the present-day band’s shakeup trickled out. But that began to change as the six accounts’ posts and comments introduced a new framework for discussion: Team Isaac versus Team Joe, old vocalist versus new.
For instance, in one March 2025 post, InnerWishbone6154 argued that The Fray “sounds like a cover band” when performing its old music, whereas “[t]he new music is a better fit for Joe’s voice.” Interestingly, the other accounts, four of which commented on the post, did not simply repeat that claim. To the contrary, DearKaleidoscope2 was “unimpressed with Joe as a vocalist” and “unhappy with the pitch correction they’ve been using to enhance his voice,” prompting firstwepour-roses to disagree and suggest any problems had been temporary: “The transition period is over and the shows are better than ever.” Meanwhile, TheWickedUrn agreed with the original poster, commenting that the new music “really shows off [Joe’s] voice” — prompting pushback from TheClassic_Star, who argued that “Joe and Isaac have similar vocal ranges and similar voices.”
Without drawing any conclusions about what, exactly, the accounts were trying to accomplish here (or who, if anyone, hired them), the clear impact of comment threads like this has been twofold: 1) boosting overall engagement on the sub, and 2) shifting the focus of discussion to the band’s new era, such that authentic sub members — even those skeptical about the new lineup and music — might want to check it out for themselves and decide where they come down in the great Isaac vs. Joe debate.
Because r/TheFray is so much smaller than r/ItEndsWithLawsuits and has, perhaps, much lower authentic engagement, it has witnessed a number of threads like this where the six accounts dominate the discussion, not just shape it. For instance, a November 2025 post by TheClassic_Star has 10 comments, five of them from fellow accounts in its cluster. Likewise, in a March 2026 thread, SunnyWays8 debated TheClassic_Star on a topic with echoes of Lively v. Baldoni: whether negative comments on another social media platform were “bots” seeking to undermine the band’s latest album release.
Just like on r/ItEndsWithLawsuits, the accounts have recycled topics, messages, and language as they engage on r/TheFray. And, in another parallel to their Lively v. Baldoni engagement, they have adopted different angles, roles, and perspectives to stoke discussion, deleting old content as they go.
In one post, for instance, TheWickedUrn represented themselves as an avid fan of The Fray, who had “seen them [live] numerous times over the years.” Two days later, they had “recently discovered The Fray”:
Similarly, DearKaleidoscope2 commented in August 2024, “I went to a show and I was disappointed,” criticizing Joe’s live vocals. Yet in November of that year, they stated in a post that they had “never attended a live show”:
“Some PR group to infiltrate Reddit”
In a development that can also, perhaps, be explained by the much smaller size of r/TheFray — which undoubtedly makes the presence of the six accounts more noticeable — sub members began to speculate in March 2025 about whether someone had “hired some PR group to infiltrate Reddit” and shape conversation about the band. One user wondered if Joe King, the guitarist-turned-vocalist, was responsible, since the accounts they had noticed seemed to be “pro-Joe.” Another user even noticed that these accounts participated in Lively v. Baldoni subs:
In the following weeks, as the six accounts made multiple posts promoting the band’s new album and upcoming world tour, more sub members began calling out what they regarded as PR infiltration. One of the six accounts, DearKaleidoscope2, engaged briefly with the call-outs, asking “What’s with the PR jokes?”, but did not respond when a user explained the basis for their suspicions:
By the end of March 2025, many users on the sub had simply accepted that the accounts were PR. Some even decided to take advantage of the direct line to The Fray, commenting on the accounts’ posts with song requests for upcoming performances:
Even if some members of r/TheFray are now more skeptical of the accounts, their ongoing posts on the sub still make an impact — not only on which topics are discussed there, but also on what people who don’t actively use Reddit see online. Most notably, the top Google search results for terms like “the fray band reddit” are now all links to posts by the six-account cluster:
More on the relationship between Reddit and Google in a moment.
Crushing It in the Heart of the Internet
On August 9, 2024, Melissa Nathan, the crisis publicist whom Justin Baldoni had recently hired, sent a text message to Baldoni’s other publicist, Jennifer Abel: “ ‘We are crushing it on Reddit’ - Jed.”
“Jed,” the man whose message Nathan was passing along, was Jed Wallace, a “digital fixer” whom Baldoni had also recently hired at Nathan’s recommendation (at twice the monthly rate charged by Nathan’s own firm). Nathan had previously described the capabilities of digital vendors she worked with, including Wallace, as “full reddit,” “engage with audiences in the right way, start threads of theories” and “social fan engagement to go back and forth with any negative accounts, helping to change narrative and stay on track.”
These text messages — along with others that described Wallace and his team successfully “shift[ing] the narrative” on social media “towards shining a spotlight on Blake and Ryan” — were famously published in Lively’s December 2024 complaint and in a New York Times article that covered her allegations, “We Can Bury Anyone,” whose headline quoted another text message sent by Nathan. (Baldoni’s countersuit alleged that the messages were “cherrypicked” and “deliberately spliced to mislead” because other messages and an emoji were omitted.)
As the litigation unfolded and discovery took place, Lively filed more messages on the public court docket that shed a bit more light on what Wallace and his team were allegedly doing on Reddit. In one message, Nathan wrote that “for 30k/month they can do the basic Reddit/X/seeding and manipulating”; after being engaged for that monthly rate, Wallace emailed Baldoni’s team promising that he had them “prioritized across all platform-specific specialists working for me.” In another e-mail, one of Nathan’s employees confirmed that the services Wallace would perform included “[l]everag[ing] relationships with Discord, Reddit, X, IG, TikTok, YouTube, etc. to expose behavior of Blake and other parties, both current and past and engag[ing] directly with communities to adjust or influence the conversations taking place in real time.”
And, shortly before the case settled, unsealed filings revealed Wallace communicating with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and his staff in November 2024 — when Kennedy was campaigning to become a member of then-president-elect Donald Trump’s cabinet — about the need to “throw a ton of upvotes at the stuff [on Reddit] that is rah rah for him especially in conservative circles where it might get back to DJT.” (Wallace’s attorney told the New York Times that Wallace was “never engaged” by RFK, Jr.)
Yet nothing produced in discovery, or at least nothing that was ever publicly revealed prior to the case settling, reached the granular level of individual Reddit accounts’ activities. The closest thing to a discussion of specific Reddit manipulation was an expert report that found signs of negative posts about Lively, including Kjersti Flaa’s interview clip, being artificially upvoted in August 2024. (Lively did file a spoliation motion based on Wallace’s and others’ use of self-deleting texts on the messaging app Signal, which her attorneys alleged had deprived her of relevant evidence regarding the execution of the alleged negative digital campaign.)
Did Lively’s team ever examine accounts like the cluster of six discussed in this article? If so, why did the public never hear anything about it before the case settled? If not, why not?
We can only speculate. Perhaps Lively’s team considered it more efficient to focus on vote manipulation. Perhaps her experts did flag specific inauthentic-seeming accounts, but were hesitant to follow up by subpoenaing Reddit — which is notoriously reluctant to hand over information that would unmask anonymous users — reasoning that even if they successfully fought to obtain the users’ information, it might not lead back to Baldoni and his PR team. (Subpoenas aren’t always public, but if Lively did subpoena Reddit for anonymous user information, the public almost certainly would have heard about it, since Reddit almost certainly would have opposed the subpoena in court.)
In short, we may never know who is behind the accounts, and we may never know why no one ever tried to find out.
The tip of the iceberg — and what to do about it
What’s clear is that these six accounts are not an isolated case. A growing number of reports suggest that astroturfing has become prevalent, even ubiquitous, on Reddit and other social media platforms in recent years.
In more benign contexts, it is often called “digital marketing,” deployed to stealth-advertise products like skincare and peptides to people who think they are getting authentic recommendations from fellow consumers. In other instances, revelations about the use of these tactics to generate hype or taste-making consensus — as a marketing firm called Chaotic Good has allegedly done for various virally-successful musicians — have sparked outrage, but only among relatively niche audiences. Yet even these case studies are almost certainly just the tip of the iceberg.
Indeed, the research featured in this article is just a small slice of what our collective has found related to the Lively v. Baldoni case alone. The evidence regarding the six accounts that also participate in the Fray sub was uniquely compelling, making it possible to take public now, but numerous other accounts with strong indicators of inauthenticity have also been flagged. Perhaps most alarmingly, some of them appear to have participated, or to currently be participating, in campaigns related not only to other celebrities and entertainment-adjacent topics, but also to political and geopolitical issues.
As the prospect of political astroturfing suggests, these tactics do not just affect the chronically online. Narratives forged in the bowels of social media — among niche Reddit forums and relatively small-time content creators — can “trickle up” into TikTok and YouTube feeds, headlines, and watercooler conversations, radiating into the zeitgeist. That might seem less concerning when it comes to which celebrities are liked or disliked, though it still shows how these tactics ultimately reach the wider public. But it is more concerning when it affects what we buy, what we put in our bodies, how we vote (or how the people who swing elections vote), and how we treat our neighbors.
And the severity of these issues is accelerating rapidly in the age of AI. In 2024, Google signed a $60 million-per-year licensing deal with Reddit, which gave Google access to all of Reddit’s user-generated content for search indexing and AI purposes. This deal has created a symbiosis between Google and Reddit, where Google AI’s knowledge base now extends down many obscure paths of cultural effluvia while at the same time Reddit’s search visibility has increased over 1,000 percent since before the deal. Indeed, in 2025, Reddit ranked second behind only Wikipedia in Google’s search results. It is no wonder, then, that the platform — which now more than ever lives up to its motto as the “heart of the Internet” — is fending off a fresh tidal wave of inauthentic accounts that seek to influence LLMs, often fueled by LLMs themselves.
In short, the incentive to manipulate Reddit has now multiplied exponentially. And such manipulation directly affects everyone — even people who don’t use social media at all — by making Google results, especially the AI summaries that are the only thing many of us read when we look something up on our phones, less reliable, sometimes even dangerously unreliable.
How do we solve these interconnected problems? Platforms and tech companies are beginning to respond. Earlier this summer, Reddit announced a crackdown on bots, and as of very recently, ChatGPT appears to be phasing out Reddit citations. Yet platforms still struggle to detect more sophisticated, human-operated inauthentic networks like the six accounts — whose activities, it is worth emphasizing, do not ever appear to have been flagged by Reddit. And it is understandable that LLMs like Google AI might be hesitant to follow in ChatGPT’s footsteps, sacrificing Reddit’s vast knowledge base. Rather than leaving tech platforms and companies to address these problems alone, intervention from other stakeholders and strategies, from regulatory bodies to media literacy initiatives, might benefit the public. Ultimately, even if coordinated inauthentic networks can’t be erased from Internet discussions, their presence and harm might be contained, similar to night noise or indoor smoking.
What’s clear is that a public conversation about how we address astroturfing that distorts the online conversation — the modern-day public square — needs to happen. And the first step is discovering just how deep that problem goes, and the nature and extent of its impact thus far.
In pictures and words
Beneath their post featured in Kjersti Flaa’s video — the one theorizing that it was, in fact, Lively and Reynolds who had engaged digital creators to smear Baldoni — firstwepour-roses fluttered through the comment section, responding to other users and dropping additional tidbits and screenshots.
Since the vast majority of users agreed with their theory, many of their responses agreed with that agreement, yet they found varied, creative ways to communicate those affirmations.
“Its so fucking obvious whats going on 😭”
“Not slick at all”
“Always trust your gut”
And in one case, simply a gif:
Endnotes
*Data collected July 1, 2026. All but one of the accounts have remained active between that date and the date of publication, so the actual numbers are higher. These numbers also exclude relevant posts and comments on subreddits like r/popculture that are not devoted primarily or exclusively to the Lively v. Baldoni litigation.
**We have chosen not to redact the accounts’ usernames for purposes of clarity, transparency, and readability. Since extensive quotations from each account’s posts and comments were required, the usernames would be easily discoverable in any case. The identity or identities of whoever operates the accounts, of course, remains anonymous.
About the authors: This article is the work of a research collective consisting of people from a wide range of professional backgrounds, including data science, software engineering, law, journalism, public policy, and academic research. We are not connected to or compensated by any of the parties in Lively v. Wayfarer or their representatives, or any of the parties or their representatives in any related litigation. We have chosen to remain anonymous for multiple reasons, including the tenor of online discussions surrounding the Lively case and the fact that this article is an odd fit for some of our public professional profiles.
Generative AI was not used to write or edit this article (the copious em-dashes are our own), save for a section drafted by one of us whose first language is not English (very little of the AI-assisted wording remains in the current version). Claude was used to code the purpose-built tool and for other aspects of data-collection and cross-account analysis, always with a human in the loop. Data and account histories discussed herein are on file with the authors. Journalists, researchers and others interested in learning more about our work can contact us at underneaththefeed@gmail.com.
This work is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0