The morning after going toe to toe online with supporters of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a special education teacher in Texas awoke to a startling image.
Despite not having any photos of their then-4-year-old daughter on social media, Steven Jarvis and his wife found themselves on a July morning last year looking at a sexually graphic meme of their own child posted to Twitter by an anonymous account.
“One of the accounts had put my child’s picture up with basically a porn-style message: Mr. Goldenballs,” Jarvis said. “They altered that image, but it was clearly my child.”
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“It’s the only thing, honestly, that’s really, absolutely made me angry, because my daughter was 4 years old when they took the image, which I believe was from my sister-in-law’s Facebook,” Jarvis said.
Jarvis, who has tracked disinformation campaigns and conspiracy theories as an off-duty hobby since the 2016 election, said he’s developed a thick skin. But seeing pro-DeSantis accounts, and other apparent bot networks, accusing him of being a pedophile—and posting details of his marriage that could only have been gleaned from direct messages on Facebook, Jarvis said—shattered the barrier between his compartmentalized worlds.
It wasn’t an isolated incident. For some who criticize the Florida governor and likely 2024 presidential candidate, a pattern appears to be emerging: attack DeSantis publicly, and risk your personal information posted online by pro-DeSantis accounts.
A Florida political research hobbyist, for instance, discovered her address had been posted online after she caught a wave of harassment from pro-DeSantis accounts. Later, her full name was posted. The threats continued, and she’s since gone off the grid.
Last week, one of the leading accounts in DeSantis’ online army tweeted security camera footage from a county sheriff’s office—along with other footage from the home of Rebekah Jones, a former data scientist for the Florida government who was fired by DeSantis in 2020 and later ran against Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL).
In the messy episode last week that riled up DeSantis’ supporters, Jones initially claimed Florida State Police carried out an “armed raid” on her home at the order of the governor.
The released footage undermined Jones’ already strained credibility by showing she had drastically exaggerated the encounter—and that her 13-year-old son allegedly said “I want to shoot up the school” in a group chat, far from the innocuous explanation she initially offered.
But the swift dissemination of the security camera recordings by pro-DeSantis Twitter accounts—along with a redacted version of the arrest warrant just hours after Jones went public—sent alarm bells ringing for other targets of the DeSantis digital machine.
“The whole point is to get them to stop talking about those points, to silence them,” said Jarvis. He shared screenshots along with other corroborating information from the time of the threats, along with two others who wished to remain anonymous for their safety.
The account going by the pseudonym Max Nordau—who previously told The Daily Beast they are not paid on behalf of DeSantis and are not “a state employee, a member of a political campaign, or an employee of any political organization”—did not respond to The Daily Beast’s request for comment on how they obtained the security camera video.
It’s unclear the extent to which DeSantis and his inner circle are personally aware of the hardball tactics, or how coordinated the actions of these Twitter crusaders are. However, as The Daily Beast has previously reported, building seemingly disparate networks of influencers with DeSantis connections to push preferred messaging lines is a key part of the emerging campaign’s strategy.
Notably, the bare-knuckled tactics and pile-ons against people like Jarvis have not been discouraged by the DeSantis network, with some key figures like communications adviser Christina Pushaw openly praising particular accounts.
The account which targeted Jarvis and others, @KassandraSeven, has been specifically praised by Pushaw as the source of “a lot of useful info." Representatives for DeSantis did not return a request for comment.
As he has risen to political prominence, DeSantis’ style has drawn plenty of comparisons to former President Donald Trump, his former top ally turned archenemy. Like Trump, DeSantis has relentlessly attacked critics in what he calls the “corporate press,” even going so far as to claim that media outlets were rooting for last year’s Hurricane Ian to do more damage in the state.
But when it comes specifically to the playbook of quashing dissent, the governor’s spiritual forebear might be a better fit for a different former president—Richard Nixon—a dynamic that could add a sharp edge to a potential DeSantis 2024 run.
Beyond his penchant for stopping at nothing to silence his most ardent critics, Nixon himself is famous for transforming “the press” into “the media.” He exclusively used the latter term because, as Northwestern journalism professor Jon Marshall put it in a 2014 Atlantic piece, “the media” was a more ominous term.
Nixon famously bullied reporters, avoided coverage, and used his government to go after specific journalists—wiretapping their phones or pushing for IRS audits on his most hated individuals.
Although the Florida governor wasn’t yet born during the Nixon years, his reputation for dwelling on personal slights and his ruthless drive to silence critics bears a closer resemblance to the 37th president than the 45th.
While Trump clearly vilifies “the fake news,” he also embraces many individual reporters, obsesses over coverage, and will even sometimes participate with stories and outlets that may be unfriendly. DeSantis seems more like Nixon; he’s not interested in granting access to anyone but the most flattering journalists—and is more likely to not open up even when a story could be good for him.
In perhaps the clearest sign of his view toward the press, in February, DeSantis mounted a push to weaken state libel and defamation laws to pave the way for more lawsuits against media outlets. On Tuesday, the Florida legislature advanced bills that would limit the governor’s travel records from public view.
A seasoned GOP strategist who’s worked on several presidential campaigns described DeSantis as taking a more “Nixonian” approach.
“It makes them look very weak and desperate,” this strategist told The Daily Beast.
There were plenty of stories in the 2016 campaign about how a Trump retweet could upend an ordinary citizen’s day and lead to horrendous threats. After the 2020 election, Trump supporters’ conspiratorial search for scapegoats—egged on by Trump himself—dramatically disrupted the lives of election workers and volunteers.
But the invasive and aggressive character of the pro-DeSantis online warfare is a more distinct and new phenomenon, as are the targets—who are, for the most part, random people online.
“I mean, I don't think this strongman appeal is, you know, getting in Twitter fights with people,” the GOP strategist added.
As The Daily Beast reported, DeSantis’ digital operation began recruiting conservative social media influencers before the 2022 midterms, promising to boost their follower count and engagement with the help of an alleged “bot farm,” according to three Republican influencers who received the pitch.
The apparent strategy was novel in straddling the line between “astroturfing” and “a coordinated strike,” Carnegie Mellon University professor Ari Lightman told The Daily Beast at the time, particularly with the blurring of lines between real human and anonymous or bot accounts.
While DeSantis’ digital army remains strong, a different set of players have gotten involved in going after the governor’s critics.
Unlike the mainstays of the DeSantis Twitter squadron, KassandraSeven—which attacked Jarvis—tends to chase clicks on hot topics outside of politics and does not stick to the governor as consistently. The account has deleted over 100,000 tweets, according to screenshots shared with The Daily Beast.
Yet when the account went to bat on behalf of the governor with its nearly 85,000 followers, Jarvis said he had never seen anything like it.
“It’s digital warfare,” he said.
The GOP presidential campaign strategist said that the culture of intimidation and bullying condoned by the DeSantis team is startling. The presidential campaign veteran recalled an incident, first reported by The Daily Beast, when former Newsmax host and pro-DeSantis personality John Cardillo threatened a Trump-aligned consultant at the Conservative Political Action Conference in March.
In another instance of intimidation, the Florida researcher’s full name was revealed in the middle of a private live-stream audio discussion she was hosting. Her father later experienced similar threats.
DeSantis allowing this kind of behavior to go un-admonished, the strategist argued, enables a culture that can get far uglier downstream with supporters.
“Clearly, they are threatening people indirectly,” the campaign veteran said of the DeSantis political operation.
“You have a very enabled group where they think they can throw veiled threats at people because they see their leader doing it,” they said. “It’s the weaponization of government, and now they’re weaponizing this campaign against anybody who pushes back against their idol.”
Correction: In a previous version of this story, The Daily Beast misidentified an account as participating in online harassment campaigns when they had not done so.
