Authenticity is a Con: Synthetic Social Signals
Lane Brown in Vulture explaining why "the feed is fake" and how that "viral" song, movie, meme, influencer, or celebrity drama was probably the product of a stealth marketing campaign:
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.[âŚ]
In March, Jess 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 every level of the music industry, from major-label pop stars to niche indie acts. Spelman called the practice âtrend simulationâ. His motto: Everything on the internet is fake.â
But how does it work, exactly?
If enough of these clips rack up enough views fast enough, credulous social-media algorithms interpret the spike as an authentic surge of interest and push the videos to real users, who sometimes generate real engagement, prompting the algorithm to push those videos even further.[âŚ]
Clipping is different. It doesnât fake the stream itself; it fakes the appearance of excitement that causes real people to stream. âYou might incept an actual trend - you have a chance for a 100-times return on your ad spend.
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If real users donât watch or share the clips, a campaign fizzles. So in that sense, a lot of what clipping does is help good artists find the audiences who wouldâve liked them anyway by accelerating the early excitement just enough to push them past the algorithmic threshold that decides who gets discovered and who doesnât. But the problem is that everybody has figured this out now, so the threshold keeps moving.
Maybe the feed isnât fake exactly. But it is synthetically stimulated. Synthetic social signals.
Itâs a greyhound racing hare for your eyeballs - meticulously manufactured to attract your attention and stimulate your emotional instincts.
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 suggestâŚprofiles 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 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.
Naturally, the more cynical operators move beyond flooding the zone to shaping the narrative:
The thing that most bothered people about Chaotic Good Projects wasnât clipping but a related service the company calls ânarrative campaigns.â Clipping just puts an artist in front of more eyeballs; narrative campaigns tell those eyeballs what theyâre seeing. Chaotic Good co-founder Jesse Coren explained the idea to Billboard at South by Southwest. âA lot of what we do on the narrative side is controlling the discourse,â he said. âMost people see a video or see something about an album that came out and itâs like the first thing that they see, or that first comment that they see, is their opinion even when they havenât heard the whole album.â In other words, in a world drowning in information, nobody has the time to form an opinion from scratch anymore, so they check captions, comments, and quote tweets to see what people who seem like them have to say. And if everybody is outsourcing their first impressions to the crowd, why not just manufacture the crowd? Co-founder Andrew Spelman gave the example of a musical performance on Saturday Night Live: âThe second SNL drops at midnight, you should post a hundred times saying that was the best performance of the year.â
Clipping is the new normal. The feed is fake. And none of this is new or necessarily bad. Popular culture's superficial authenticity has always been a con.
The Rolling Stones' "dangerous, dirty and degenerate" persona was manufactured by their management.
The original Grand Theft Auto manipulated mainstream media to manufacture moral panic. Trust me, I was there.
Now it's Justin Bieber:
In April, Bieber â who is among the most-streamed artists in pop history and has 287 million Instagram followers â 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 Iâd been monitoring hosted paid campaigns for Bieberâs Coachella performances, offering clippers as much as a dollar per thousand views. The announcement for one campaign read, in all caps, âTHIS IS SO VIRAL GO GO GO GO.â (Bieber was also listed as a client on Chaotic Good Projectsâ website before his name, along with the rest of the companyâs roster, was deleted.)[...]
Whoever paid for the Bieber clipping campaigns â his reps did not respond to multiple calls and emails â seems to have gotten their moneyâs worth. In the days after the first Coachella set, a video of Bieber performing âDaisiesâ became the most-watched clip from this yearâs festival on Coachellaâs official YouTube channel, racking up more than 21 million views, twice as many as any other 2026 video. Bieberâs catalogue drew 664 million streams globally in the week ending April 16, a 171 percent increase over the previous week. âBeauty and a Beat,â his 2012 collaboration with Nicki Minaj, debuted on the Billboard âGlobal 200â 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.
How much of that lift came from the Coachella sets themselves, and how much came from the thousands of paid clips amplifying those sets, is hard to say. But the blurriness is the whole point. The artist gets a bump, the bump canât be definitively attributed to the campaign that paid for it, and nobody can say for sure whatâs organic and what isnât.
For entertainment and amusements, who really cares? Authenticity is a con. And the feed is a virtual reality.
The problem comes when people arenât in on the joke and donât recognise the kayfabe. A dangerous parasocial paradox emerges.
More critically, what happens when bad actors and foreign adversaries use the same machinery to shape national narratives and seed division?
The reason all of this is happening, probably more than any other, is that clipping is cheap. And not just cheap â cheaper than almost any form of advertising that has ever existed. A typical clipping campaign costs clients roughly a dollar per thousand views, what marketers call a \$1 CPM. By comparison, a billboard might cost \$10 per thousand estimated passersby; a TV spot can cost \$30 or more per thousand viewers; a magazine ad can run even higher. An officially purchased TikTok ad, the kind labeled âSponsored,â can cost ten times what a clipping campaign does, with the added disadvantage that its viewers will know theyâre watching an ad. The math of clipping is so favorable to clients that in many cases campaigns end up giving away views for free. Clipping agencies typically donât charge extra if a campaignâs view count exceeds whatever the client originally paid for; once the budget is met, the meter stops, but the clips that have been posted keep circulating. Khrish Kewalramani, the co-founder of the clipping agency Spade Clipping, told me one of his recent campaigns cost the client less than \$10,000 and resulted in nearly 100 million views. âWhy is anyone spending money on a billboard,â he asked me, âwhen I can get your brand in front of people for a fraction of the cost?â
A smart cynic might say $10k to poison the well of 100m people is the best-priced weapon of mass deception on the market.