Nick Fuentes’ social-media reach inflated by faceless followers, foreign accounts: study

The social-media rise of pro-Hitler provocateur Nick Fuentes has alarmed conservatives, but there may be less to his audience than meets the eye.

A Network Contagion Research Institute report released Monday said Mr. Fuentes’ account on X with 1.1 million followers has likely been juiced by artificial means, finding that 92% of his repeat early retweeters are fully anonymous and that his early retweet velocity outpaces even that of Elon Musk, the platform’s most popular figure with 229.5 million followers.

Mr. Fuentes outperformed four other major online political figures, including Mr. Musk, in his first 30 minutes of engagement on their 20 most recent tweets for the period ending Nov. 6-7, a result described by the institute as “radically disproportionate” to his number of followers.

“It is highly questionable, at best, that such numbers can be produced organically,” said the report, “How Fuentes’ Coordinated Raids and Foreign Fake-Speech Networks Inflate His Influence.”

“The likely conclusion to be drawn is that such velocity is artificially induced – in other words, manipulated by actors coordinating in unison in order to amplify his reach,” it stated.

In addition, half of the retweets on Fuentes’s most-viral posts in the months before conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s Sept. 10 assassination came from accounts heavily concentrated in India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Malaysia and Indonesia.

“These regions have no organic link to Fuentes’s politics but do match the known geographic footprint of low-cost engagement farms, making the pattern consistent with bot-farm amplification rather than genuine foreign audiences,” said the report.

The report said Mr. Fuentes’ requests to “retweet me” and “retweet this” are not genuine appeals for engagement, but “synchronized directives” that may violate X’s ban on “orchestrated amplification, bulk engagement, and the coordinated use of inauthentic accounts to game visibility.”

“Taken together, the evidence points to a deliberate, foreign-influenced campaign – relying on anonymous and possibly automated accounts – to artificially inflate Nick Fuentes’s reach, gaming the platform’s algorithm in a systematic effort to elevate his influence far beyond what genuine grassroots support could achieve,” the 23-page report said.

🚨BREAKING: A new report from @ncri_io shows that Nick Fuentes’s sudden mainstream visibility reflects a coordinated illusion instead of a grassroots surge.

According to NCRI, Fuentes’s rise was driven by synchronized amplification networks, anonymous booster accounts, foreign… pic.twitter.com/eLCff8y1hG

— Colin Wright (@SwipeWright) December 8, 2025

Mr. Fuentes has not yet reacted publicly on the report. The Washington Times has reached out to him for comment.

His defenders pushed back Monday on the findings with comments on X such as “I’m convinced Nick Fuentes’ popularity is real” and “the real answer is Nick speaks for multiple generations of forgotten men.”

The explosive conclusions come amid growing trepidation on the right over the 27-year-old livestreamer’s soaring profile.

Mr. Fuentes has positioned himself as the voice of “America First” and disaffected young men, a claim boosted by his large social-media following, declaring himself the leader of a “Groyper” insurgency against the Trump administration and the conservative movement.

His litany of outrageous comments is legion. He has praised genocidal dictators Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin, as well as such U.S. adversaries as Russia, China and Iran.

He’s also downplayed the Holocaust, encouraged marriage with 16-year-old girls, and contended that Jim Crow segregation benefited Black Americans.

Even so, conservative host Tucker Carlson featured him in a friendly Oct. 27 interview, prompting an outcry on the right after Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts defended Mr. Carlson and rejected calls to “cancel” Mr. Fuentes.

The Kirk assassination also raised the profile of Mr. Fuentes, a competitor with the Turning Point USA co-founder for the backing of young conservatives.

Legacy media outlets have picked up on the narrative, calling him a “White nationalist problem for the right” (New York Times) and “the center of an existential crisis in American conservatism” (The Atlantic).

The Rolling Stone trumpeted an article Monday entitled: “The War Over Nick Fuentes is Over. He Won.”

What the institute’s report suggests is that the Groyper uprising may be something of a social-media mirage.

Colin Wright, an evolutionary biologist and Manhattan Institute fellow, said that the report shows that Mr. Fuentes’ growing visibility was “manufactured.”

“To outside observers, all this sudden attention made it seem like Fuentes had genuinely become a major force on the right,” said Mr. Wright on his Reality’s Last Stand page on Substack.

“But the NCRI report shows that this was mostly an illusion created through a complex mix of coordinated retweeting, anonymous booster accounts, foreign engagement, and a media environment that misreads a burst of online activity as evidence of genuine grassroots influence,” he wrote.

The NCRI, a nonprofit research organization that works with universities including Rutgers, focuses on cyber-social threats, foreign influence and extremism.

The Media Bias/Fact Check website gave it a “right-center” bias ranking and a “high credibility” rating.

The report concluded that “manipulated visibility structures” pose a problem for “democratic discourse and the quality of American civic behavior.”