Swifties swiftly research voter registration after Tay Tay endorses Kamala Harris for President

Image via AP.

About 337,000 Americans visited the vote.org website Tuesday night after pop sensation Taylor Swift endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for President and encouraged fans to register to vote.

That interest derived from Swift’s Instagram post announcing her endorsement just after Harris concluded her debate with former President Donald Trump. The current Vice President has been widely heralded as the debate winner, according to a data analysis from Final Round AI.

The group analyzed searches for voter registration after the presidential debate and Swift’s endorsement, as well as searches for 121 terms related to artificial intelligence and how to spot AI-generated misinformation. Swift noted in her Instagram post that her endorsement was largely issued to set the record straight on her voting intentions after Trump posted an AI-generated image falsely suggesting the singer had endorsed him.

Overall, voter registration inquiries online skyrocketed during the presidential debate, the analysis found, with searches peaking 44 minutes into the debate.

Delaware posted the highest percentage of its searches related to voter registration, followed closely by New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, Texas and Ohio.

Notably, Pennsylvania, Georgia and North Carolina are among seven key battleground states that could determine the outcome of this year’s Presidential Election.

It’s also worth noting that Georgia landed at No. 10 among states where searches showed the most concern for AI misinformation. The state, which President Joe Biden only narrowly won in 2020, showed a 7% increase in keyword searches related to AI misinformation over the national average, an indication that Georgia residents, or at least some, are taking steps to avoid falling into the misinformation trap. Florida was just above Georgia, at No. 9.

Massachusetts, New York and California were in the top three spots, all posting at least 40% more searches related to AI misinformation than the national average. It’s worth noting that all three states are heavily Democratic. In fact, only one state in the Top 10 — Florida — voted for Trump in the 2020 election. All others went for Biden.

Looking further down the list, only four states that voted for Trump in 2020 landed in the Top 25, while only three states that voted for Biden were in the bottom 25.

“While AI serves much good, bad actors in the political space use the power of AI to generate masses of misinformation to further their own goals. One noteworthy way of doing this is with AI-generated impersonations of celebrities saying or doing things they did not do in real life,” Final Round AI CEO Michael Guan said.

“Taylor Swift is possibly the most high-profile example of this, such as when the Trump campaign published images that may have been generated with AI of her falsely endorsing him for President. Swift cited these concerns about AI in her endorsement of Kamala Harris for President in the wake of Tuesday’s presidential debate, in which she urged her followers to register to vote in November’s elections.”