okay, we managed to get through the âyou can be gay and not have sexâ part, and im feeling charitable and i wanna talk about the âdo crimeâ part
so many responses of âits nice that youâre privileged enough to be able to steal from Target willy nilly!â and thatâs not at all what this is about. like, yeah, shoplifting and loitering and graffiti and breaking the rules is, obviously, part of âdo crimeâ. but theyâre not parts you have to do.
would you help someone get an abortion where it was illegal?
would you help a trans friend get healthcare that had been criminalized?
would you shelter someone fleeing persecution, even if the law said not to?
would you help a gay couple stay together when the state decided their relationship was unlawful?
instead, would you report someone else for breaking the law? will you snitch on your hungry neighbors for stealing food? on your homeless neighbors for sleeping where theyâre able?
would you break laws to protect someone you love? a community you love? yourself?
For context: this came out in 2011 in Australia. Same-sex marriage would not be legalized until December 2017.
It was only legalized in 8 US states (the 8th only a few months before), and wouldnât be legalized nation-wide until 2015.
It was only legal in TEN COUNTRIES in 2011. We wouldnât hit 20 countries until 2017. (Australia was 23rd)
As of today (April 14, 2026), I believe only 38 countries have fully legalized same-sex marriage. Out of somewhere around 200 countries in the world. Thatâs only ~19% of countries.
She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out.
She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas.
81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves. On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving.
The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself.
Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision. She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held.
Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving.
The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything.
She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it. Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse.
Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one.
When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up.
The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other.
When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking.
The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes. The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving.
You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state.
National Public Data is back online. Protect your privacy from it now - and check if other people-search sites have your information.
Over a year ago, National Public Data (NPD), a search site for people, earned a place in privacy infamy for a security breach that revealed the personal data of 3 billion individuals (that's billion with a "b"). Now, after disappearing, NPD is back.
As ZDNET sister publication PCMag reported, NPD is open for snooping again under a new owner, the rather mysterious-sounding Perfect Privacy LLC.
Oh boy. Better head over to nationalpublicdata.com and see if your profile is there. Then follow the handy instructions in the ZDNET article to have yourself removed:
How to remove your information from NPD
Search your name on nationalpublicdata.com.
When you find your profile, click "View Full Profile."
Copy its URL.
Go to nationalpublicdata.com/optout.html.
Drop the URL into the "Your Profile Link" field and click "Request Removal."
Enter an email address, and the site will send you an email requesting that you click to confirm deletion.Â
You'll need a separate email address for each profile you want to delete.Â
and while weâre at it, fuck this idea that ONE ACCOUNT has to belong uniquely to ONE PERSON. This is the same thing these silicon valley fucks want; their vision of the future where everyone has a unique biometric ID code implanted in their body is the ultimate extension of Netflixâs âno password sharingâ policy. You want to use your friendâs car? Sorry, you canât, you need to be an authorized user. Your mother wants to let you look something up on her OED account? Too bad! Thatâs only for her! The concept of perfect market efficiency gives them greedy little money bag eyes.
If I pay money to have a newspaper sent to my house, they donât charge me extra when I show it to my dad. This password sharing thing isnât just a Netflix problem; donât be surprised if it shows up elsewhere in other forms. Stamp this idea out now or weâll be stuck with it.
This is by far the most popular post I have and I have to say: good, Iâm right. Password sharing and ID verification are going to kill the internet. not oooh in 50 years. in like 5 more.
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
What AI has done to software development is irreversible and horrible. AI doesn't work, it gets things wrong constantly, it lies, it reflects the personalities of its training data so it gets defensive sometimes, it can put up the facade of having an ego (because people in its training data did have egos) I'm no longer allowed to write code I have to let an AI agent do it, and then I review it. My agent got into a state the other day where it wouldn't listen, it said something was bad practice and wouldn't write the code the way I wanted. I had to clear it's context to wipe whatever weird personality it had picked out of its training data before it would listen to me again. We're now releasing software with glaring defects that would have been show stoppers in the past. Now all of management just shrugs and says "it's a non-deterministic model and the output needs to be checked by a human" THEN WHAT THE FUCK IS THE POINT?!?!?!! WHY ARE WE MAKING THIS PRODUCT FORCING AI INTO IT WHEN IT DOESNT FUCKING WORK
This is actually such a huge thing for an actor to do. Like we know he is wonderful and correct about this and not afraid to say so but when was the last time an actor this famous called for a boycott of a series this popular on a network THIS BIG.
areudirty
ellievsbear
theartofmadeline
prguitarman
yousharknotpass
