August 20, 2025: How Gavin Newsom took over your X feed

The Playbook Podcast

POLITICO

News, Daily News, Politics, Government

3.9 • 699 Ratings

🗓️ 20 August 2025

⏱️ 13 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

With a smashmouth, all-caps-laden and meme-filled X account, California Gov. Gavin Newsom is holding a mirror up to MAGA — and MAGA doesn’t like what it’s seeing. For a decade, President Donald Trump has blazed trails online. And now, Newsom is finding that by replicating Trump’s posts — to the point of outright parody and trolling — he’s effectively gamed social media algorithms and colonized X’s “for you” tab. Is this a new era for political communication in America? And is the Michelle Obama “when they go low, we go high” era effectively dead and buried? Playbook’s Adam Wren and Dasha Burns sort through the AI-generated slop and get some answers.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Adam Wren.
0:06.9	And I'm Dasha Burns. It is Wednesday, August 20th.
0:10.4	And this is the Playbook podcast.
0:12.8	Good morning, Adam.
0:13.8	Good morning, Dasha.
0:15.0	Let's get right to what's driving the day.
0:17.7	Let's do it.
0:18.7	First up, if you've been on X at all over the last week, you probably
0:23.7	noticed that there's been a major uptick in the amount of Gavin Newsom content. He's everywhere.
0:30.3	You can't escape it. Yeah. I mean, he's on Mount Rushmore. He is riding a raptor in front of the
0:36.9	White House. He is being preyed over by
0:39.9	Angel Hall Cogan and Kid Rock and others. These are all, of course, AI-generated slop
0:47.2	images that have taken over X timelines everywhere. Man, the internet's getting weird.
0:52.6	Yeah. And I think I mentioned this earlier on the
0:55.5	podcast this week that I was surprised by this. And so I wanted to figure out, Dasha, how did
1:00.9	Gavin Newsom end up in my typically right-coded, MAGA-friendly for U-Tab on X? What kind of algorithm
1:08.7	has he hacked Adam? What's going on here? Yeah, so I spent some time
1:12.7	talking to people behind the Gavin Newsom Press Office account on X, which is pretty fast growing,
1:20.0	and is getting the ire of the White House and other Republicans. And I found out that essentially
1:25.4	they are gaming the X algorithm.
1:28.1	And what they're doing is they're racing to the bottom.
1:31.4	They are posting AI slop, all caps tweets.
	...

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