Read Laterally
When looking on X (Twitter), I came across a post from someone named Bo Loudon (someone who I have never heard of). In the post, Loudon mentions a recent Fox News discussion about RFK Jr. talking about how he was suing Donald Trump, but Trump still allowed RFK Jr. to travel with him despite being sued by him. After this, Loudon states "The FAKE NEWS has done EVERYTHING to hide Trump's true, loving side."
After seeing this, I wanted to look into Bo Loudon by 'reading laterally' to see if he is a reliable person to get information from.
First, I clicked on his profile. Right away, he has a banner of him standing next to Trump, both holding their thumbs up. This made me think right away that this person is a very pro-Trump account and his posts would reflect that. When looking through his posts, this is very true.
When looking through all of his posts, with a great example being shown above, a lot if not all of them are far right-leaning posts that are extremely anti-democrat. A lot of these posts are also rage-baiting posts, making compares and contrasts between real world issues/topics and use them to make republicans look better and democrats look worse. The post above, saying that Obama complimented Trump before he eventually ran for president and this being an example of 'people loving him before running for president', is a great example of making compares and contrasts to get a certain reaction from readers.
Next, I clicked on a link in his X bio that directed me to his personal website. On the website, no past experiences or credentials are listed. A YouTube page is listed, which does show videos of Bo appearing on news shows (again, all very right-leaning) like Fox News. All the videos, however, were posted in the last 3 months, which means this kid may have just started recently posting.
Looking at his personal website more, there is a section showing that Donald Trump has acknowledged him on his platform Truth Social. However, especially since after Trump talked about a false claim that illegal immigrants were eating pets like it was fact while at his debate with Kamala Harris, even an approval coming from a former president does not mean that the person in question is reliable. Because of this, I decided to dig further and threw Bo's name into Google.
After typing his name into Google, a few things stood out. One: it lists his followers on Instagram. As an earlier picture showed, on X, Bo has 147.6 thousand followers. On Instagram, however, Bo has over 253 thousand followers. This is interesting to me, as Instagram is known to be less politically driven then X, with X users usually having more followers and engagement for political-based accounts than Instagram does.
His Instagram page, however, is basically the exact same type of content as his X page, so this did not help anything at all.
The one notable thing about his Instagram page compared to his X page, however, is that the link on Instagram is completely different from his X link. On Instagram, the link posted brings you to a page where you can buy a Trump sticker pack (note: Not joking, between me writing this post to then going back and grabbing these links only a few hours later, the link on his Instagram changed sites. Originally, it was this sticker pack site as shown above. Now, it changed to a link to buy this book on Amazon). To me, having a link on a politically based social media platform like this comes off as caring more about selling merchandise than caring about actual politics, so this does not start Bo off on a good note, in my opinion.
When looking at the results of articles just by typing in Bo Loudon's name, the results given already give off negative implications for being a reliable source. The sources shown above, an article from a website called Hola.com and another from Hindustan Times, both sources that are pretty unknown. A lot of these smaller sources were the only sources really talking about or acknowledging Bo, which brings Bo's credibility down. Both articles do focus on Bo having a friendship with Trump's son Barron Trump and that he is apart of Trump's Gen Z influencer team. Even with this, I still do not know details on what experience specifically that Bo has to make him a reliable source in politics.
After this, I searched a little deeper, and found out an important piece of why Bo focuses on talking about right leaning politics online, and also something that leads me to believe that Bo is not only an unreliable source, but also be connected to someone who is a known liar of important information. I found a Wikipedia page of his mother, Gina Loudon. According to this page, she was a member of Trump's media advisory board for his 2020 campaign, as well as a member of Mar-a-Lago and Citizens Voters Inc. When looking further into the Wikipedia page, however, a troubling piece of information shows up. Under the 'persona life' section, it is stated that "The Daily Beast reported that Loudon's book falsely claimed that she has a PhD in psychology. Loudon does have a PhD in human and organization systems from Fielding Graduate Institute (now the Fielding Graduate University), an online school. A personal assistant for Loudon responded to the reports, saying that Loudon's PhD was in the field of psychology. The publishing company, Regnery, told the outlet that they were responsible for several misleading statements about Loudon's qualifications, including referring to her as "America's favorite psychological expert," (Wikipedia). Although this is stated to be a mistake on the publishers part, she is still liable of lying about a degree that she had.
When getting to this conclusion, the main thing that frustrated me about learning more about Bo is that there was no information on him. I even went to his Linkdln page and, even there, nothing is on the page regarding his degrees, general education or what experience he has to talk about politics. He barley even had any followers on that page. I was struggling to come up with a conclusion. Then, I was scrolling through his X page more, and found this piece of information out:
According to his own X post posted back in April of this year, he is a Trump activist (which was already obvious) but also that he is only 17 years old as of last April. Knowing his age makes it very telling why there is not much information on him outside of his social media posts. Only being 17, he is still probably a high school student or just started college (his friend, Barron Trump, just started college in the last month). Due to this, he does not even have an actual job in the government or politics, as you must be at least 18, sometimes even older, to have an actual working position in politics. This makes Bo not a reliable source for information about politics, as he is only just putting his feet in (his posts across X, Instagram and YouTube show that he has only started talking about politics in the last 6 months), no known degree in the political field, and does not have enough experience to be considered a reliable person to listen to and take as fact in the world of politics.