The Social Media Feed Is Fake

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Joe Lim estimates that 90 percent of what you see on the internet is advertising in disguise, and he should know. For three years, Lim ran a company called Floodify, which at its peak operated 65,000 dummy social-media accounts used to drum up attention on behalf of paying clients. On a typical day, he says, Floodify posted 50,000 videos across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and X, all of them designed to pass for the unscripted output of ordinary users.

“We promoted music for all the major record labels,” says Lim, 29, who lives in San Francisco. “We worked with a top-five celebrity I can’t name. We got 40 million views for an artist with just a hundred thousand followers.” Floodify’s services were in demand in politics, too. “When Eric Adams was running for reelection, his team asked me to do a campaign with videos of AI-generated influencers shitting on Mamdani: ‘This grocery-store idea is bullshit.’” Lim says he turned down the Adams job not out of principle but because a consultant working with the campaign stopped replying to his emails. (Eric Adams’s former chief of staff Frank Carone tells me, “I have no knowledge about this, but I would have encouraged it.”)

The point of this kind of marketing is that nobody is supposed to notice it. But lately, the machinery has started to show. In March, Jesse Coren and Andrew Spelman, co-founders of the digital music-promotion agency Chaotic Good Projects, gave a live interview to a Billboard reporter at South by Southwest in which they breezily described using sock-puppet accounts to manufacture enthusiasm for artists at every level of the music industry, from major-label pop stars to niche indie acts. Spelman called the practice “trend simulation.” His motto: “Everything on the internet is fake.”

In a couple of weeks of lurking in these clipping communities, I saw campaigns scroll past for Bad Bunny, Zayn Malik, Fleetwood Mac, Shania Twain, Luke Combs, Noah Kahan, Teyana Taylor, Teddy Swims, Dominic Fike, Kane Brown, Netflix’s The Night Agent, Apple TV+’s For All Mankind, the horror movie Insidious 6: Out of the Further, the Michael Jackson biopic Michael, the betting platform Kalshi, and the Met Gala, among others. This doesn’t necessarily mean the campaigns were paid for by anyone directly associated with those people, movies, TV shows, apps, or events. In some cases, the clipping agencies might have launched them on their own to lure prospective clients or astroturf themselves. But it’s hard to know for sure since none of the representatives for the people or things listed above responded to my calls or emails asking for clarification.

 

And then there was Justin Bieber. In April, Bieber — who is among the most-streamed artists in pop history and has 287 million Instagram followers — headlined two consecutive weekends at Coachella, playing before massive festival crowds and millions more watching on YouTube. Coachella is the biggest stage in pop music save only for the Super Bowl, the kind of event that in theory generates its own attention. And yet on both weekends, a Discord server I’d been monitoring hosted paid campaigns for Bieber’s Coachella performances, offering clippers as much as a dollar per thousand views. The announcement for one campaign read, in all caps, “THIS IS SO VIRAL GO GO GO GO.” (Bieber was also listed as a client on Chaotic Good Projects’ website before his name, along with the rest of the company’s roster, was deleted.)

Why would someone as famous as Justin Bieber need clipping? The people I asked seemed touched by my naïveté. “Anyone who wants to go megaviral now, they need to pour fuel on the fire,” says Lim, who admits he has no specific knowledge of the campaign but knows there is so much spam and pretend hype on the internet that nothing cuts through without artificial help anymore, not even huge artists with real audiences. Keith Presley, the co-founder of Gudea, a behavioral-intelligence firm that uses AI to track the sources of viral phenomena, put it more broadly: “I don’t know if we’ve found a true viral trend in a while. All of them are going to have some sort of inauthentic behavior behind them.”

Whoever paid for the Bieber clipping campaigns — his reps did not respond to multiple calls and emails — seems to have gotten their money’s worth. In the days after the first Coachella set, a video of Bieber performing “Daisies” became the most-watched clip from this year’s festival on Coachella’s official YouTube channel, racking up more than 21 million views, twice as many as any other 2026 video. Bieber’s catalogue drew 664 million streams globally in the week ending April 16, a 171 percent increase over the previous week. “Beauty and a Beat,” his 2012 collaboration with Nicki Minaj, debuted on the Billboard “Global 200” at No. 4 and ascended to No. 1 two weeks later, only the second non-holiday song to top the chart more than a decade after its release.

Manipulating algorithms is only part of the goal. The other is fooling humans, particularly the dwindling number of journalists, critics, and other gatekeepers who are still capable of conferring legitimacy by paying attention. Livestreamers were among the first to discover that clipping could make them seem more significant than their real statistics would suggest. Two of the most successful are the Groyper-provocateur Nick Fuentes, who’s been banned by most major platforms but remains artificially overrepresented on TikTok thanks to his clips, and Clavicular, the looksmaxxer who was recently charged with a misdemeanor for shooting an alligator on one of his streams and who credits his golden-ratio handsomeness to smashing himself in the face with a hammer. The New York Times recently profiled both of them as figures of great importance — which they are now in the sense that profiles in the New York Times can occasionally make people seem important — even though the live shows that are ostensibly their flagship product usually draw concurrent audiences in the low-to-mid-five figures, less than a fading cable-news show does during a slow hour. Reporters and editors who get their ideas from their social-media feeds — which is most of them, most of the time — can mistake a paid simulation of public interest for the real thing and then make it real by covering it.

Much of this is, by the way, at least theoretically illegal. In late 2024, the Federal Trade Commission adopted a rule that bans undisclosed endorsements, paid social-media posts that mimic those of normal users, and the operation of networks of accounts to artificially inflate the popularity of a product or person. Penalties run more than $50,000 per violation, which, if applied to just the campaigns I saw myself on Discord and Whop, would amount to enough money to buy all the social-media platforms and ruin them all over again in a whole new way. None of the clipping-agency operators I spoke to seemed concerned about this. None had ever heard of anyone in their industry being investigated by the FTC, much less fined. When I asked a spokesperson for the FTC whether the agency had any plans to take action against clippers, he replied, “Hi there, we’re not going to comment. Thanks.”

A similar pattern showed up in the stink over Sydney Sweeney’s American Eagle commercial last summer, in which the slogan — “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans” — provoked accusations that the ad was promoting racial superiority, prompting others to mock the backlash, with Donald Trump eventually swooping in to defend Sweeney on Truth Social. The bot-detection firm Cyabra analyzed seven days of activity around the ad and determined that 15 percent of the TikTok accounts commenting on it were fake but had created a disproportionately large percentage of the uproar. “The public reaction wasn’t all fake,” Cyabra’s CEO, Dan Brahmy, says. “But it was amplified by inauthentic activity.” American Eagle, for its part, made little effort to defuse the situation, releasing a somewhat pointless statement (“great jeans look good on everyone”) days later. “They chose on purpose to essentially say, ‘It’s okay to have backlash,’” Brahmy says. “There was no such thing as bad publicity in that case.” During the controversy, American Eagle’s stock rose 10 percent, adding roughly $400 million in market value.

What all of this amounts to isn’t just one problem but a stack of them, each feeding the next. Most people now encounter the world through algorithmic feeds built to warp reality, on platforms with every commercial incentive to keep users scrolling and very little incentive to distinguish genuine interest from astroturfed imitations. Into those feeds flows an unprecedented amount of undisclosed advertising engineered to resemble the improvised enthusiasm of human strangers. The platforms reward it with reach; traditional media picks it up and validates it. Meanwhile, as trust in journalism collapses and most of the actual reporting disappears behind paywalls, readers head straight for the comment sections, which seem more like the voice of the people than anything written by a reporter — except many of those commenters may not be people at all.

The good news is that this will all be over soon, according to Lim, because something worse is coming to replace it. He recently shut down Floodify after trying to scale too fast and falling behind on deliverables. At one point, the company accidentally posted the same video to 7,000 accounts, which got them all banned. But he wasn’t discouraged. When we last spoke, he was building a new company and thinking even further ahead. “All of this nonsense is only going to last three to five more years, because in the future, people will stop trusting what they see on social media.” By then, the job will have moved one layer up. “You’ll have to start distributing your content toward AI agents and then they’ll teach humans what they want.”

 

Full article:

https://www.vulture.com/article/social-media-feeds-chaotic-good-projects-clipping.html

 

[onTheBrink 50]

I'd go further and argue a large portion of any successful artist's popularity is down to stealth marketing, as opposed to overt marketing. That music industry is slick

[Alxjcgn 1,961]

Literally everything on social media now is an ad or for money. The amount of times there are links attached to instagram videos/posts is annoying. The greed is sickening lol I miss when social media was only about sharing stuff with friends.

Now everyone is too self-conscious to even show themselves having a good time

[NemoMyName 1,942]

social media stopped being social media around 2013-2015, now it's just ads and ****