Read the Tag Before You Share

Paid social media posts are dressing up campaign messages as neighbors talking. Before we pass them along, rural North Carolina should ask who paid for the seed.

No farmer I know puts seed in the ground without reading the tag. You want to know what’s in the bag, how it germinates, and who stands behind it. The tag doesn’t tell you whether to plant. It tells you what you’re working with.

We need that same habit with what crosses our phones this fall.

Andrew Dunn, the conservative columnist who publishes the Longleaf Politics newsletter, recently flagged a growing business: paying ordinary-looking people to post videos about how expensive life has become. He found roughly a dozen North Carolina accounts posting nearly identical clips about rent and power bills. He also cited reporting on a listing that offered creators $1,500 a month to talk about affordability ahead of the midterms.

Dunn is careful to say he hasn’t traced who, if anyone, paid for the North Carolina posts. That uncertainty is the point. And both parties are in this game: Republicans courted online creators in 2024, and Democrats are now organizing creator networks of their own.

Trust is rural currency

Let me be clear: the cost pressures are real. Fuel, fertilizer, power, land, and labor have squeezed farm families and small towns across this state. Nobody in our world needs a paid influencer to tell them a farm budget is tight.

That’s exactly why this matters. When someone else picks the topic and pays for the delivery, a real concern becomes a campaign tool. The people living it get crowded out by people performing it.

Trust has always been the currency of rural life. We built this state’s farm economy on voices we know: the county Extension agent, the co-op manager, the feed store counter, the neighbor across the fence line. An undisclosed paid post borrows that kind of trust without earning it. It looks like a neighbor talking. It’s an ad.

And farm issues won’t stay off the menu. If affordability videos can be ordered by the dozen, so can posts about food prices, farmland, trade, or anything else that touches our industry. With AI able to produce a convincing face and voice on demand, the next “farmer” in your feed may not be a farmer at all.

Know where the data came from

Our sister organization, the NC Ag Partnership Foundation, has begun a series of regional meetings for farmers, elected officials, local ag groups, and community partners. The meetings introduce the Foundation’s data dashboards, which show agriculture’s economic impact by county and legislative district. The project is supported by the NC Tobacco Trust Fund Commission. In these meetings, we talk about one simple principle: data is only as good as its source.

A grower doesn’t act on a soil test without knowing which field it came from and which lab ran it. A yield map is worth something because you trust the monitor that recorded it. Before spending a dollar on a number, a good farmer asks who collected it and what they wanted it to show.

We owe ourselves the same discipline as citizens. A video in your feed is a data point. Before it shapes your vote, or your neighbor’s, it deserves the same questions.

Read the tag before you share

A few habits go a long way:

• Ask who’s behind it. How long has the account existed? Does it post about anything else, or only this?
• Watch for the pattern. The same script from five different faces is a campaign, not a conversation.
• Lean on sources you can hold accountable. A named reporter, your local paper, your legislator’s office, Extension, your commodity association.
• Remember that a share is an endorsement. When you pass something along, you lend it your name.

Dunn argues the fix starts with clear disclosure: viewers should know who paid for a political post and whether the person on screen was generated by AI. That’s a reasonable, nonpartisan ask. We already expect a “paid for by” line on TV and radio ads, and that standard should follow political messages onto our phones.

He’s also right that disclosure won’t replace judgment. A paid post can look exactly like an honest opinion, so the last line of defense is still us.

Rural North Carolina has always been good at telling the genuine article from a sales pitch. Early voting is under way through Oct. 31, and Election Day is November 3. Check your registration, find your early voting site and make a plan to vote at ncsbe.gov. 

So read the tag. Then decide. That isn’t cynicism. It’s stewardship of our votes, our communities, and the trust that has always held rural North Carolina together.