Rachele Gilman & Zoé Fourel Rachele Gilman & Zoé Fourel

The Super Bowl Kicked Off Well Before the Game Started

How a halftime show, presidential politics, and immigration enforcement turned a cultural moment into a battleground

How a halftime show, presidential politics, and immigration enforcement turned a cultural moment into a battleground

Days before kickoff, the build-up has already produced a familiar American spectacle. A globally successful pop star, Bad Bunny, has been framed as a political provocation.  The president of the United States has publicly attacked the booking before the event even happened. A conservative organisation has announced an “All-American” counter-event. Fabricated quotes circulated under the names of football players and musicians who never said them. Federal immigration enforcement has confirmed operations in the host state. None of this is peripheral noise. It is unfolding at the centre of the country's most-watched cultural broadcast.

The Super Bowl has always been more than “a game”. It is a national media ritual built as much around advertising as athletic competition. Millions of Americans tune in primarily for the commercials. Others watch exclusively for the halftime show. The event exists as a shared cultural moment that is commercially viable, culturally dominant, and broadly legible, even as almost every other public space in the US fragments.

That commercial logic is precisely why the selection of Bad Bunny should have passed without controversy. He is among the most successful artists in the world, deeply embedded in the U.S. mainstream, and eminently marketable. He recently became the first Latin artist to win the Album of the Year Grammy. The halftime show itself is a carefully engineered piece of entertainment, with sponsorship and production constraints that make it resistant to genuine disruption, which is why political meaning usually attaches only in retrospect. However, artists of colour, and especially women of colour, often pay a heavier price in post-show backlash. 

That asymmetry is not hypothetical. The divergent aftermaths of Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake following the 2004 halftime show remain one of the clearest examples of how responsibility, punishment, and reputational damage are unevenly distributed. Jackson’s career absorbed the shock, while Timberlake’s continued largely uninterrupted, a reminder that controversy at the Super Bowl does not land equally. In 2016, Beyoncé’s performance of Formation during Coldplay’s halftime set was widely read as an explicit intervention in the Black Lives Matter moment. The backlash was swift, including calls from police unions to boycott her concerts. What followed established a familiar pattern: when performers of colour use the Super Bowl stage, political meaning is not inferred quietly but imposed loudly.

In this case, that imposition arrived early and through identity. Bad Bunny is Puerto Rican, from a U.S. territory, and therefore an American citizen, a reality that tends to disappear once language and culture are treated as proxies for loyalty or value as a citizen. That erasure sits within a longer pattern. During Trump’s first term, Puerto Rico was repeatedly treated as peripheral to the nation, most infamously during the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, when federal response failures and public rhetoric signalled distance rather than solidarity. Anti-Latino language and policy escalated during his campaigns and presidency, normalising suspicion, vilification, and dehumanisation in ways that make the current framing of Bad Bunny legible rather than surprising.

Against that backdrop, the backlash was near immediate. Spanish-language entertainment was treated as a signal, and Latino visibility was recast as intent, with support for the performance becoming evidence of ideology, specifically a woke anti-American ideology. Donald Trump, the sitting president, used the authority of his office to criticise the choice, dismissing the performers in public statements that framed the booking as unacceptable. The NFL responded by standing by its decision, an unusually direct move, likely tied to its drive to increase Latino audiences. President Trump then doubled down.

The game's location made escalation almost inevitable. Super Bowl LX is being held in California, where Gavin Newsom has spent months positioning his governorship in opposition to federal immigration policy and presidential overreach. Newsom narrates those clashes in real time, treating social media as both stage and megaphone. 

As the controversy gathered heat, organised counter-framing followed. Turning Point USA announced plans for an “All-American Halftime Show” to run alongside the official broadcast, positioning it explicitly as an alternative for those who see the NFL’s choice as a betrayal of cultural norms. The announcement mattered less for what it promised; no performers or even a venue were secured, but rather for what it implied. “All-American” functioned as a boundary rather than a description, casting the NFL’s programming as something that required correction because it was, at best, not American or worse, anti-American.

That framing did not remain confined to formal political organisations. In the months following the halftime announcement, petitions circulated online calling for George Strait, a white country singer positioned as more “family friendly”, to replace Bad Bunny. The language is familiar and revealing. “Family friendly” has long functioned as a proxy for policing cultural expression that falls outside white, heteronormative norms, recasting exclusion as concern rather than hostility.

Turning Point USA operates in an ecosystem where cultural outrage is a resource and symbolic events are useful currency. Figures such as Erika Kirk, working at the intersection of influencer culture and political activism, translate elite rhetoric into shareable provocation. In that economy, a halftime show is not entertainment but raw material.

Meanwhile, the information environment filled itself with story and counterstory. A quote falsely attributed to Jason Kelce, a former NFL player, circulated widely online, presenting him as weighing in on the Bad Bunny controversy. The wording was supportive of Bad Bunny and critical of the backlash, but Kelce publicly stated that the quote was fabricated and that he had not made any comment on the issue.

The fabrication worked because it leaned on existing narratives that treat the NFL and celebrity culture as politically coordinated, and that read cultural figures as ideological proxies.  Kelce’s prominence, combined with his relationship to his NFL playing brother Travis Kelce and the wider attention surrounding Taylor Swift, Travis’s fiancée, made the attribution feel plausible to audiences already inclined to read cultural visibility as political signalling. When the quote was debunked, the correction did not restore clarity so much as redirect attention. For some, it became evidence that the controversy itself was manufactured. For others, it reinforced the belief that culture was being mobilised against them. In both cases, the meaning behind the narrative circulated faster than facts.

This dynamic is amplified by shifts in audience composition. The Kelce brothers’ New Heights podcast has expanded far beyond football fandom, particularly following its crossover with mainstream pop culture through Taylor Swift. Episodes now routinely reach audiences well outside sports media, making the platform an attractive terrain for narrative insertion. In that context, attaching meaning to Jason Kelce is less about him than about access to an increasingly broad and politically diverse audience.

A similar dynamic played out with Carlos Santana, whose name was used to lend weight to claims that he had condemned Bad Bunny’s selection. The quote circulated widely before Santana publicly refuted it, making clear he had not criticised the performer or performance. The episode mattered not because the claim was persuasive on its own, but because Santana is both a Latino artist and an elder statesman of American music. His reputation was pressed into service to suggest that opposition to Bad Bunny transcended generational and cultural lines, even where none existed.

Cardigan Collective has not conducted a quantitative analysis of the amplification patterns behind these specific fabrications. This episode highlights the need for systematic, cross-event analysis of cultural and celebrity moments as a category of information risk, where similar narratives, rhetorical strategies, and amplification pathways recur with striking consistency. The pattern suggests a repeatable playbook, and likely overlapping actors and shared ecosystems operating beyond the Super Bowl case.

Off the field, the conditions around the event shifted in ways with real consequences. California’s relationship with federal immigration enforcement is already tense, and the visibility of ICE activity around a globally watched event has tangible effects. A Guardian report confirmed that ICE will conduct enforcement operations in the Bay Area in the lead-up to the Super Bowl, a practice the agency has documented around previous games but which now carries a different weight.

These dynamics help explain Bad Bunny’s own decisions around performance and place. He has made only a few appearances in the continental United States, citing concerns about fan safety amid ICE raids, and has instead centred performances in Puerto Rico. That choice reframes the halftime controversy not as performative politics, but as a response to conditions that artists and audiences alike must navigate.

Federal immigration enforcement around major sporting events is not unprecedented, but its effects are well-documented. ICE has publicly described operations tied to previous Super Bowls, including Super Bowl LI, while The Guardian's reporting confirms similar enforcement activity planned for Super Bowl LX. In California, local officials and community organisations have publicly warned that such visibility discourages attendance at public events and increases fear among immigrant and Spanish-speaking communities, particularly in moments of heightened national attention. These responses are not the product of online speculation alone. They reflect the lived experience of enforcement elsewhere, combined with the knowledge that a moment of heightened visibility rarely brings protection.

It is in this context that the halftime show has been pulled fully into the political arena. A Spanish-speaking Latino headliner, presidential criticism before the event, a counter-event framed as “All-American,” and confirmed federal enforcement activity in an already angry host state do not operate as separate stories. Together, they shape how the event is experienced before the first down is played, particularly by communities for whom visibility already carries risk.

As this unfolded, writers such as Rebecca Solnit framed recent cultural moments, from pro-immigration statements at awards shows to public denunciations of federal policy, as evidence that legitimacy is being fought in public view, with artists and audiences positioned against institutions and federal overreach. That claim is itself part of the contest. Trump, Turning Point USA, the NFL, Solnit, and a rotating cast of influencers are not describing the same event in different ways. They are competing in a broader struggle over what it means to be American, and what American democracy encompasses.

Seen in aggregate, these episodes align with a broader strategy to contest American identity through culture and policy. Major shared moments are treated as leverage points, where shifting the narrative can normalise exclusion and redefine who is seen as legitimate. The goal is a gradual recalibration of what feels acceptable.

From a UK or EU perspective, what stands out is not simply that politics and sport collide, but how little distance remains between cultural visibility and political suspicion. A halftime show booking has become a loyalty test, Spanish-language a cue for threat, and immigration policy an interpretive frame for entertainment. The scale is distinctly American, but the mechanics, cultural framing, narrative acceleration, and identity-as-evidence are increasingly familiar.

The most consequential effects of this episode will not appear in ratings, reviews, or the immediate post-game coverage. They will surface later, in institutional decisions about who is considered worth the scrutiny, which forms of cultural expression are treated as risk, and which audiences are quietly deprioritised. In that sense, Super Bowl LX does less to illuminate American culture than to reveal how political power, enforcement policy, and information dynamics interact long before the show starts.

Sources and Further Reading

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Rachele Gilman Rachele Gilman

Monetising Misogyny: Engagement Farming and the Tactics Behind Incendiary Online Content

It All Begins Here

I recently contributed to a new article for the Global Network on Extremism and Technology (GNET) as part of its Gender and Online Violent Extremism series, published in alignment with the UN’s 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence.

The piece examines how misogynistic influencers and online extremist actors exploit commercial digital systems that reward hostility, outrage, and rapid engagement. These dynamics are not incidental. Platform incentives often amplify deliberately incendiary content, creating pathways that can move users from general hostility towards more explicit ideological narratives and, in some cases, violent extremism.

Our analysis focuses on engagement farming and monetisation strategies, exploring how misogyny and violence against women are leveraged to generate visibility, profit, and influence at scale. These practices expose users to increasingly extreme content while obscuring the economic drivers that sustain it.

Understanding these mechanisms is critical for policymakers, researchers, and practitioners working on online safety, extremism, and information risk. Without clearer insight into how commercial incentives intersect with ideological mobilisation, responses will continue to address symptoms rather than underlying structures.

The article, co-authored with Fabio Daniele, Laura Bucher, and Giampaolo Servida, reflects ongoing work to better understand how gendered harms operate within contemporary digital ecosystems.

📄 Read the full article here

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Rachele Gilman Rachele Gilman

Sensing The Signal Podcast

It All Begins Here

I recently joined Sensing the Signal, a bi-weekly podcast produced by Atreides, for a conversation on information manipulation and its implications for national security, technology, and intelligence.

Information manipulation is a pervasive and growing threat. Its impacts are often subtle, cumulative, and difficult to detect, yet they shape how societies understand risk, trust information, and make decisions. In the episode, we explored how information manipulation operates within complex information environments, why it remains so difficult to analyse at scale, and what this means for analysts and decision-makers working across public and private sectors.

A central theme of our discussion was the need for shared standards and frameworks. Without common approaches to defining, assessing, and investigating information manipulation, efforts remain fragmented and complex to compare or scale. Developing structured, evidence-based methodologies is essential if we are to move from reactive responses to more durable forms of resilience.

What gives me optimism is the growing community of practitioners, researchers, and policymakers working collaboratively to bridge these gaps. While the challenge is significant, there is real momentum to build a more coherent knowledge base and to improve how we understand and respond to information risk.

I’m grateful to Terry Pattar for a thoughtful and wide-ranging conversation, and to the team at Atreides for creating space for these discussions.

🎧 Listen to the episode here

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