This is a masterpost of the verified families that asked for my help in sharing ther fundraisers, please share their stories, if you can, please donate $5+ that you would've spent on drink or a snack to these Go Fund Mes. Their accounts are all tagged here as well as the posts I made, so go to them and reblog/share to reach more people. Free Palestine and may you all be blessed!
1) Mohammad Atallah @mohammedatallah
GFM:
Hello kind friends and dear community,
My name is Haruka A⊠Haruka Aoki needs your support for Bone Grafting Operation for Muhammad & Ho
Mohammad is a SEVENTEEN year old that got shot with an explosive bullet during February of this year. He is in urgent need of a BONE TRANSPLANT, as well as to help thirteen members of his family. Your donations will ensure his operation and the safety of his family, as the funds will be used to pay for medical fees and to rebuild their home. His campaign was shared by @90-ghost here!
He currently has $20.2k over the $82k that he needs. Please help him reach his goal!
2) Asma Ayyad @asmaayyad
GFM:
I am Asmaa, 25 years old, the daughter of this beautiful family of 8 members. ⊠Asma Ayyad needs your support for Help me and my family esca
Asma is 25 years old with a family of eight members. During this genocide, she and her brother lost their houses, she lost her dearest pet cat, and struggle with the bare necessities of life. Her family's health is at risk and she wishes to evacuate and start a new life. The funds will be used to evacuate and provide basic needs such as food and treatment.
Her campaign is vetted in the GazaVetters document, #43.
She currently has $21.7k over the $45k she needs. Please support her fundraiser!
3) Heba Yasmeen and Yasmine Mahmoud @yasminsalahmahmoud
GFM:
This is a message from three brothers suffering from a lack of means of life in the ⊠Heba Yasmeen needs your support for Help our children
Heba is a mother of three children, Lulu, Celine, and Ismail, in which Celine suffers from Chronic Thalassemia (decrease in Red Blood Cells) and blood deficiency and needs urgent treatment. Yasmine is her sister and 21 years old and was studying Health Administration before her dreams were destroyed by the war due to the demolition of her university.
The campaign documents more, and it is vetted through association here.
Their campaign is only at $2.3k over the $40k they need. Please support their fundraiser!
4) Ayman Qandeel @aymanqandeel17
More Under The Cut:
GFM:
Hello, I am full of hope and wish that you will read my message with love and that you ⊠Duha Qandeel needs your support for Help me bring
Ayman was an engineer who used to work at his father's engineering office, when unfortunately during the war was destroyed along with everything in it. He has seven family members whom he wishes to evacuate to ensure their future. The funds will be used for evacuation and housing expenses.
He is vetted in the GazaVetters document here.
Ayman's fundraiser sits only at âŹ169 over the âŹ50k he needs. Please support his fundraiser!!
5) Baraa and Abed Rahman El-Shaer @bara-belal
GFM:
I am starting this fundraiser for my friend, Abed. I am from the USA an⊠Heather Burnham needs your support for Help Abed's Family Survive a
Abed used to take treatment in order to finally have a child, but unfortunately it was stopped due to the war. His house and workplace were fully destroyed during the bombings, and now that he has moved, he finds no shelter. Water and food are harder to obtain, and cannot provide themselves with daily food. He wishes to evacuate his family of five members, his mother, wife, brother, sister, and younger brother.
He is vetted in @el-shab-hussein and @nabulsi 's Google Sheets, #253 here.
His fundraiser is only at $9.3k over the $50k he needs. Please support his fundraiser!
6) Mahmoud Ayyad @mahmoudayyad
GFM:
I am Mahmoud Ayyad and his family from Gaza, I share with ⊠Mahmoud Ayyad needs your support for Urgent aid ! Help to fight starvation fo
Mahmoud has forty-three members of his family that he wishes to evacuate. They currently live in bad conditions and there are diseases spreading. With your donations, he can leave Gaza and build a new house.
He is vetted in @90-ghost's reblog here.
His fundraiser is only at âŹ7.1k over the âŹ55k he needs. Please support his fundraiser!
7) Iman Sadeq @imansadeq96
GFM:
I am Iman Sadeq, an architect and my husband, Helmy Shurrab, is a lawyer and aluminum ⊠Nour Abdelkadr needs your support for Help Iman's fa
Iman currently resides in Mawasi Al-Quarara in the Southern Gaza Strip with her husband and three year old daughter. They are living with no toilets, difficult weather, and do not have the basics of life. She will use your donations to pay for the family's expenses, and evacuate them.
She is vetted in The ButterflyEffect Project's document here.
Her fundraiser is only at âŹ8.8k/âŹ50k, please help!
please help spread this,Indonesians that are speaking up are actively being silenced.if you didn't know,Indonesians are protesting against their own government but instead of listening they decided to silence us by shutting down TikTok live in Indonesia since people are updating about the protest through there.Now the police are being told to harm the very same people they are supposed to protect. No one is safe. Recently,on 28th of August a 21 year old delivery driver named Affan Kurniawan was struck by a police vehicle not once but TWICE.the police vehicle stopped for a moment and ran him over again,what baffles me the most is that they said it was an "accident".there was also a video where one of the polices in the car was caught saying " Tabrak aja"(just hit them).people said that multiple people were also struck by the Police vehicle but I don't know if its true or not.recently in Jakarta mass shootings are actively happening,there were teenagers that got hit and died some weren't even joining in the protest.the police are also attacking the medical teams and journalists even though there's a rule to never harm or attack them.all of this isnt entirely the polices fault,it's mostly the politicians that ordered them to do it.it was also said that some of the d3ad bodies were even thrown into the lake.
Please pray for us and help spread this.
Like I said,Indonesians are actively being silenced about this situation.they are even planning to cut off the internet and electricity so whenever you try to record what's going on you will hardly be able to see anything.
People here are celebrating Eid al-Adha while I'm struggling in the hospital to save my wife from death, fighting to get her treatment, fighting for her survival.đ
We haven't received any donations for three days. Why are you ignoring me? If anything happens to my wife, I will never forgive anyone who ignored me, didn't help, and didn't share this post.
You have no idea the extent of the pain and the dire circumstances we are enduring. Here, there is daily Israeli bombing, destruction, and the killing of innocent people. Women and children die every day because of Israeli bombing. What is the sin of the children and women who are being killed? This is genocide in every sense of the word.
The pain of loss is unbearable. I lost my mother and older brother in this war. I feel as though I am dying every day. I cannot bear the thought of losing my wife or any other member of my family. Please help me and donate to save my wife. Don't leave me alone.
My wife desperately needs treatment now. We must save her and provide her with the necessary medication. Her condition is worsening day by day due to the lack of treatment.
These may be my last words or the last time I write a post about my family, so I will not forgive anyone who sees this post and does not support me with a single word and ignores me.
Days of complete silence have passed, and I'm terrified. I check the campaign link daily, but the amount hasn't changed. Not a single euro. It feels like the world has moved on, but my nephew's pain remains. His surgery is urgent, and so are his medical needs. We're close to closing the gap, but I can't bear this alone anymore. If you have ten or twenty dollars to spare, please help us today. If you don't, your contribution is our only lifeline to reach someone who can help. Please don't ignore someone desperately seeking a lifeline for my orphaned nephew.
We need 700 euros for my nephew's surgery. The operation is in a sensitive area of ââhis body and cannot be delayed. The surgery will determine his future ability to have children, and it must be done as soon as possible while he is still young, before he grows older and suffers greatly, and may also be unable to have children. Please don't leave us alone. Help us! Donate to us!
My nephew is his parents' only child. He lost his father in this genocide in the Gaza Strip and has suffered many traumas in this war. Please don't leave him alone. Donate for his operation. Please donate, donate! đđ
If anything bad happens to me or I lose contact with you, please remember that I begged you to donate, even a small amount, or to share my post. I will not forgive anyone who sees this post and doesn't support me with a single word or a small donation, and ignores me.
Guys, someone donated 15 euros, but we still need 685 euros for my nephew's surgery amidst this genocide. I hope everyone who reads my message will donate. Please don't let us down. đ
Today I will tell you what happened to me, hoping it will move you to help. I went to the vendor in front of my houseâa small stall where he sells things for children. I bought some things for my sick nephew to make him happy, and then I quickly went home. Behind me, the entire area was targeted, and many children were injured, some even killed. I was very close to death; I swear he was only a few meters away. Please, how long will we continue like this? Please donate. I almost died today, and no one would have saved my nephew. Please, we still need 675 euros so we can pay for his operation.
Now, just tell me, if I died or anything bad happened to me, would anyone help my nephew get his surgery? Just tell me. I'm begging you, with a very tired and exhausted heart. I haven't forgotten what happened to my mother and brother. Please, I can't bear any more loss. Please donate here. đđ
We still need 600 euros for my nephew's surgery. Please, someone help us. Our goal is small compared to what others might think. We need 24 people. If each person donated 25 euros, I could get my nephew's surgery now. Please don't let us down. Donate. I haven't forgotten what happened yesterday; I almost died. Please save us and donate.
Keti Jovanovski Needs Your Help | A letter from Abdul Rahman: Dear friends and kind hearts, My name is Abdul Rahman, and I write to you from
My mother is in the ICU and her life is on the line.
Every second counts, and we are completely out of time.
We urgently need $300 TODAY to cover her emergency medical costs.
There is absolutely no room for delay, and we have no other options left.. the situation is critical and cannot wait.
Please, if you can help or take action, do it NOW and without hesitation. Your support and donation at this exact moment is what can save her life.
đ Donate here đł PayPal â Verified fundraiser
new month, same overall sitch; my wife is employed but makes piss poor wages and cannot cover our living expenses in full even at full time hours. we are behind on rent and regularly at risk of losing our home, and it takes everything i have to even make these posts, much less work a job.
my wife's links and my pay links are here | we also have patreon, ko-fi (not rly preferred) and a registry. reblogging this post (WITH NO TAGS UNLESS FOR ACCESSIBILITY) *and* donating even a little if you can helps.
my wife got paid, but we are still more than halfway to having enough to pay rent so we NEED PEOPLE TO STOP WATCHING US STRUGGLE (leave house emoji 4 rent donos) AND ACTUALLY FUCKING DONATE. im also in the negatives bc my last goal for bills didnt get met and its been so fucking hot that our electric bill is even more expensive than last months and its due soon.
Today is Eid Al-Adha, and the children in Gaza are still starving in tents and ruined homes. On a holiday like today, families and friends should be gathering, praying, giving to others, and dining together. However, in Gaza bombs still fall despite the ceasefire, and food is too expensive to buy.
Hamzaâs family is suffering from the effects of malnutrition. His family includes him, his siblings, his parents, and several young nieces and nephews. Please consider donating something to him and his family, or boosting their fundraiser. Everything counts!
Any contribution, any donation will make a big difference. I hope you will participate in this donation; our lives depend on you. My sister, myself, and all my family members are suffering from severe anemia and need treatment and to travel as soon as possible.
The Israeli occupation carried out indiscriminate bombing yesterday and again today, killing 17 innocent people. I urge everyone to stop supporting companies that aid the occupation and instead donate to the affected families.
Remember when joining fandom as a younger person meant lurking for a bit and figuring out the vibe and etiquette instead of coming in on day one and calling people weirdos for liking weirdo shit in the weirdo factory.
Here we say What is the meaning of international law at this point when some countries are allowed complete impunity to do whatever they want without consequences
Imagine an Iranian Or whatever. minister kidnapping, beating, stripping and humiliating multinational humanitarian activists at sea. The world would lose its mind.
iSRAEL IS THE MOST VILE EVIL GENOCIDAL LYĂNG DISHONEST, TRASH, PERVERTED CRIMINAL, ILLEGAL PEOPLE AND PLACE ON EARTH AND THE WORLD KNOWS IT. ...
We have been through so much and are still alive thanks to your help and donations. Without them, we would have died long ago. Thanks to them, we can buy food and medicine for my father, who has cancer. We could die at any moment because of the siege, hunger, anemia, and the closure of the crossing. Until then, please donate now.
Please donate, friends. You are our hope. Please don't ignore us. Donate now. Your donations are what keep us alive. Please donate now. We just need 50 euros to reach 11,000, please donate to us if you can please.
I'm sorry to say that,but I'm talking and no one hears me.I'm asking for help and everyone ignores me.Why is that? Why is no one helping? No one is donating? I wish if you could donate and you didn't donate,I won't forgive you Because my family and I suffer so much. And no one looks at us with mercy.
That âviralâ song, movie, meme, influencer, and celebrity drama was probably the product of a stealth marketing campaign.
link to the actual article here
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.
âWe promoted music for all the major record labels,â says Lim, 29, who lives in San Francisco. âWe worked with a top-five celebrity I canât name. We got 40 million views for an artist with just a hundred thousand followers.â Floodifyâs services were in demand in politics, too. âWhen Eric Adams was running for reelection, his team asked me to do a campaign with videos of AI-generated influencers shitting on Mamdani: âThis grocery-store idea is bullshit.ââ 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 Adamsâs former chief of staff Frank Carone tells me, âI have no knowledge about this, but I would have encouraged it.â)
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 âtrend simulation.â His motto: âEverything on the internet is fake.â
Chaotic Goodâs interview went viral the old-fashioned way: by making lots of real people mad. Some were appalled by the cynicism of the companyâs pitch, others by its client list, which included indie artists whose popularity fans preferred to imagine had spread organically. Most of the outrage focused on the Brooklyn band Geese and its frontman Cameron Winter, whose strangled, water-buffalo caterwaulings became inescapable in 2025. To skeptics, Chaotic Good seemed to provide the missing explanation for the groupâs unexpected ubiquity. Wired called Geeseâs success âa psyop,â which triggered Paste to defend the band in a piece headlined, âCongratulations, You Discovered Digital Marketing.â Then, with timing that did not discourage further conspiratorial thinking, TMZ published photos of Winter leaving a restaurant with Olivia Rodrigo, and the subject mostly changed.
Announcements for clipping campaigns posted to Discord servers.
The primary tactic used by companies like Chaotic Good and Floodify (and many, many others) is known as clipping. A record label â or a movie studio, celebrity talent agency, political campaign, or just some bozo with a video podcast â hires a company to turn a song, trailer, interview, stump speech, or whatever into short, social-media-friendly fragments, either by cutting the clips in-house or by farming them out to a network of freelance clippers. Those clips are then posted by normal-looking accounts: a meme page might serve up a quote about relationships with a new pop song playing behind it; a fan page for a horror movie might cut the scariest 20 seconds from the trailer into a loop and post it twice a day; another account might chop the most entertaining exchange from a three-hour podcast and rebroadcast it to people who would never sit through the entire episode. 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.
Clippingâs origins go back at least to 2022, when the influencer Andrew Tate deployed members of his fan club to post clips of his podcast on social media, causing so many people to wonder who he was and why he was clogging up their feeds that he briefly became one of the most Googled people on earth. Since then, and especially over the past year, clipping has gone professional. Dozens of agencies now offer the service to paying customers. Many operate out of public view, inside members-only communities â which I found were not so hard to join â on platforms like Discord and Whop, where they recruit regular people to do the posting. Each community functions as its own marketplace. An agency announces a new campaign, specifying where the clips should run (usually TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube) and what they pay (usually $1 or $2 per thousand views). Members then have a few days to make and upload as many clips as they can, hoping at least one will go viral. A clipper who posts a single video might earn nothing if it flops or thousands if it hits. The founder of one agency tells me his top clipper has earned over six figures publishing across thousands of accounts.
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, Netflixâs The Night Agent, Apple TV+âs 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 doesnât 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 itâs 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 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. Until recently, an artist looking to juice his streaming numbers might have paid third-party services to send bots to Spotify. An executive at a Hollywood talent agency tells me that fake streams are a âloss leaderâ for the music industry, a fixed cost that produces a fixed number of fake-looking plays, âand thatâs never going to incite a wildfire moment.â 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 â you have a chance for a 100-times return on your ad spend,â the executive says.
Thatâs not to say that clipping is a magic bullet or that any artist can become Bieber or Geese if they spend enough money. 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. Dan Brahmy, the CEO of the bot-detection firm Cyabra, compares this to a professional soccer league in which every club has secretly bribed a referee. âIf you have one team that doesnât have enough money, or just isnât aware that you can bribe a ref to always win the quarterfinals,â he says, âthat team is out of the system.â
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, whoâs 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 â which they are now in the sense that profiles in the New York Times can occasionally make people seem important â 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 â which is most of them, most of the time â can mistake a paid simulation of public interest for the real thing and then make it real by covering it.
The screenwriter William Goldman once famously wrote that ânobody knows anything,â by which he meant that no one in Hollywood has any idea in advance which movies will turn into hits. That line has become true in ways Goldman could never have imagined when he wrote it, in 1983, when in retrospect we actually knew quite a bit. Back then, at least we knew, after the fact, which culture products had found an audience because we still had trusted metrics for cultural success that were tracked and audited and reported by people whose jobs depended on getting them right.
But none of that applies anymore. Most culture is streamed inside apps that lock their consumption data in a black box, report whichever proprietary metric flatters them most, and refuse to be audited or to convert their stats into anything that can be compared with those of any competitor. Even the artists whose work all this machinery is supposedly serving no longer have a reliable way to know what real audiences actually want, since whatever feedback reaches them may already have passed through the same apparatus built to distort that feedback in the first place. In that vacuum, fakery thrives. When nobody knows whatâs actually popular, the appearance of popularity matters more than popularity itself.
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
To be fair, social-media platforms brought this on themselves. The great pivot to video of the past decade was sold to the world as a simple accommodation to user behavior: People didnât want to read anymore; they wanted to watch. But that was only partially true. Platforms wanted video even more because they could charge more for video ads than they could for the banner ads that used to fund beautiful websites like the one youâre reading right now. So those platforms repaved most of the internet into surfaces that could host video ads, then incentivized users and publishers to roll their cameras. The pivot worked. Metaâs revenue has grown more than tenfold since the mid-2010s, and TikTokâs global revenue is expected to top $30 billion this year. But the same shift that made these platforms rich also created a monster that they couldnât control. Our feeds now require an almost-infinite supply of short-form video, and clipping helps provide it, but it presents a moderation problem with no good solution. Clipping is hard to trace, hard to tell apart from ordinary posting, and hard to eliminate without killing off much of the engagement that these platforms have come to depend on.
I asked TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube whether they were aware of the scale of clipping activity on their platforms and what, if anything, they planned to do about it. A TikTok spokesperson told me, âWhen we become aware of this type of violative content on TikTok, we take it down,â and confirmed that the company had taken down a batch of clips Iâd sent over as evidence of a clipping campaign involving the country singer Kane Brown. (Iâd long suspected heâd been cheating to outrank me in search results.) Instagram didnât respond directly to me but did recently announce what looked like an oblique answer: The company would expand an existing rule so that âif you mostly share content from others that you didnât make or meaningfully edit, your account wonât be recommended to people who donât follow you.â (In many clipping campaigns, videos are, technically, âmeaningfully edited,â so whether this rule will catch any of them is unclear.) A YouTube spokesperson, meanwhile, replied to me with a statement: âYouTube has long-standing rules to protect the integrity of our platform, and we continuously evaluate our policies to ensure they are in the right place.â The next day, a new clipping campaign appeared on one of the Discord servers Iâd been watching â for Google I/O, the annual developer conference run by YouTubeâs parent company.
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, âHi there, weâre not going to comment. Thanks.â
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
Chaotic Good agreed to a phone interview with me and then canceled five minutes before our scheduled call. The company offered to take questions by email instead and a week later sent back answers attributed to all four of the companyâs co-founders, many of which walked back things theyâd already said. The SNL example had been âjust a hypothetical example of social-media strategy around a key moment.â Narrative campaigns, they now claimed, âmostly consist of consulting on digital PR strategy.â Asked why every artistâs name had been removed from the companyâs website, the co-founders wrote that it was âso our artist partners donât get wrapped up in false accusations or misconceptions about how their music was discovered.â
Even some other clipping agencies find narrative campaigns distasteful. âI think thereâs a massive fundamental difference between getting a bunch of volume posts up and astroturfing the comments to influence perception, like, âThis is the best performance Iâve ever seenâ â that is bullshit,â says Ben Klein, the co-founder of Hundred Days, a Brooklyn-based digital marketing agency that provides some of the same services as Chaotic Good. âPeople arenât dumb anymore, and they know what the truth is. They have eyes, they have ears, they have a gut, and they can just feel if something is manufactured.â
But Klein might be giving people too much credit. According to Keith Presley, the co-founder of Gudea, narrative campaigns are far more common and effective than the public knows. Gudeaâs main business is using AI to detect coordinated activity on social media, and Presley says he and his team have observed these tactics being used across a wide range of subjects. âWeâve seen this used for stock manipulation, to promote skin-care brands, to shape conversations around AI, you name it,â he says. Many of Gudeaâs clients are large companies looking to defend themselves against what he calls âcorporate espionageâ â paid narrative campaigns run by smaller competitors designed to damage a larger brandâs reputation just enough to make its customers defect. The thinking, says Presley, is that âif you have a bad opinion about Chips Ahoy! you still want your chocolate-chip cookie. And then youâll just buy a different brand.â (Neither Chips Ahoy! nor its parent company Nabisco is a Gudea client.)
The same scheme works on people. The dominant technique now isnât so much inventing a controversy from nothing as choosing which real minor outrage to fuel. Because you can usually find someone on the internet mad about almost anything, the job is mostly to choose which objection to amplify and how loudly. In one case, Gudea tracked a campaign promoting a rumor that the cover of Taylor Swiftâs 2025 album The Life of a Showgirl contained Nazi symbolism that started in the fringes of X and Telegram before being amplified by what Gudea calls ânon-typical accounts,â until regular users picked the rumor up and ran with it. Who would do such a thing? âWell, whoâs trying to take down Taylor Swift so they can be the next Taylor Swift?â said Presley. (He did not offer a more specific guess.)
This type of digital subterfuge became known to the world last year during the legal fight between Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni, when court documents showed communications between Baldoniâs team and the crisis-PR firm the Agency Group, or TAG PR, describing a multilayered strategy designed to convince the public that Lively was difficult to work with and Baldoni was the aggrieved party. The proposal, according to those court documents, involved using subcontractors to manipulate SEO to âchange subject-matter opinion on the first page of Google,â coordinate with social platforms and forum moderators to deemphasize or remove damaging posts, and seed Reddit with âthreads with theoriesâ favorable to Baldoni. âWe can bury anyone,â TAG PR CEO Melissa Nathan wrote in one text message, adding that the work would be âuntraceable.â The price tag for a four-month blitz against Lively was $175,000. Baldoniâs attorney denied that any smear campaign was ever run.
Most of the best-known work in this space relates to crises. Over the past decade, Nathan has worked, through various scandals, with clients including Brad Pitt, Drake, Travis Scott, Rebel Wilson, Logan Paul, and Johnny Depp. But itâs easy to imagine the same infrastructure being used to shape perceptions on matters with lower stakes. In text messages quoted in the court documents, Nathan tells Baldoniâs team about another contractor who, for $25,000 a month, offers âsocial fan engagement to go back and forth with any negative accounts, helping to change the narrative and stay on track.â Once you know that such a product exists, itâs hard not to think about it every time you see a sudden flood of enthusiastic posts about a famous personâs new project or haircut or outfit or relationship or face.
Some narrative campaigns donât just push one side of an argument; they push both. That, Presley says, is what Gudea saw in the fuss leading up to Bad Bunnyâs performance at the Super Bowl halftime show in February, which broke along predictable political lines: MAGA-aligned commentators complained about the NFLâs decision to hire a Spanish-speaking artist, and progressives pushed back. Gudea analyzed 3.7 million related social-media posts and found that fewer than 4 percent of the accounts in the conversation generated more than a quarter of the content. Also, the two opposing narratives were mirror images of each other in volume and posting cadence, suggesting that the same culprit may have been amplifying both sides of the fight. Gudea speculated that nation-state actors might have been responsible, but itâs not the only possibility or even the most intuitive one. By the time the controversy burned itself out, the NFL had gotten exactly what it wanted from a halftime show â a week of saturation coverage with a culturally divided country griping about its programming choices â while Bad Bunny got the kind of attention that even a global superstar canât always buy directly. His representatives did not respond to requests for comment.
A similar pattern showed up in the stink over Sydney Sweeneyâs American Eagle commercial last summer, in which the slogan â âSydney Sweeney Has Great Jeansâ â 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. âThe public reaction wasnât all fake,â Cyabraâs CEO, Dan Brahmy, says. âBut it was amplified by inauthentic activity.â American Eagle, for its part, made little effort to defuse the situation, releasing a somewhat pointless statement (âgreat jeans look good on everyoneâ) days later. âThey chose on purpose to essentially say, âItâs okay to have backlash,ââ Brahmy says. âThere was no such thing as bad publicity in that case.â During the controversy, American Eagleâs stock rose 10 percent, adding roughly $400 million in market value.
At a certain point, the distinction between celebrity nonsense and geopolitical information warfare breaks down. The same feeds that can turn a jeans commercial into a referendum on race can also carry foreign-influence campaigns disguised as normal posts. In September 2024, the Justice Department exposed a sprawling Russian operation known as DoppelgĂ€nger, which had been registering fake versions of real news sites with URLs like washingtonpost.pm, publishing plausible-looking articles â pro-Russian framings of the war in Ukraine, immigration scare stories, LGBTQ-targeted culture-war pieces, antiâKamala Harris messaging â and then amplifying them through bogus social-media accounts posing as ordinary Americans. The point wasnât just to spread propaganda but to make it look like something real that people had found, believed, and shared. The effect of all this is that every public argument big enough to be noticed now comes with a question attached: Is this legit, or did somebody just pay to make it look that way?
What all of this amounts to isnât 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 â 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 wasnât discouraged. When we last spoke, he was building a new company and thinking even further ahead. âAll 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.â By then, the job will have moved one layer up. âYouâll have to start distributing your content toward AI agents and then theyâll teach humans what they want.â
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