New York magazine - 90 percent of what you see on the internet is advertising in disguise

[IcyPeas]

Interesting and long article from Vulture (New York Magazine)

The Feed Is Fake

That “viral” song, movie, meme, influencer, and 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.

“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. …

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

https://archive.ph/PfWXv

Absolutely read this

www.vulture.com/article/soci...

— Molly Jong-Fast (@mollyjongfast.bsky.social) 2026-05-16T12:32:38.664Z

[highplainsdem]

1. Of course generative AI enables this sort of thing. And I found the last paragraph of the article chilling,

with the prediction that in a few years, as people become more skeptical of what they see on social media, the advertisers will instead find ways to target the personal AI agents that the AI companies want people to become dependent on, and then those AI agents will "teach humans what they want."

[LearnedHand]

3. That leapt out at me too

[dalton99a]

7. +1

[LearnedHand]

2. I thought my BS detector was fairly sophisticated

But clearly not. This is so cynically discouraging. I always knew advertisers considered humans to be enemies who needed conquering, but this is a battlefield of which I was unaware.

[LakeVermilion]

4. I guess...

it’s good to be 80. I’m sure the young will adapt.

[RockRaven]

5. And add to your reading list that Reuters article about how scammy Meta/FB is, knowingly and purposely.

In case anyone missed it:

https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortune-deluge-fraudulent-ads-documents-show-2025-11-06/



Social media algorithmically-driven feeds are a blight. The posts are fake, the trends are fake, the ads are fake. It is all full of fakery. To make money off of YOU. Be offended. Stop being a tool.

[IcyPeas]

9. The scale of the fraud ....

The article is maddening.

Meta ... projected ...that it would earn about 10% of its overall annual revenue – or $16 billion – from running advertising for scams and banned goods, internal company documents show.

Holy shi... :

... to support AI, Meta was constructing a data center in Ohio that will be the size of New York City’s Central Park.

And this:

After police in Singapore gave the company a list of 146 examples of scams targeting that country’s users last fall, Meta staff found that only 23% actually violated the platform’s policies. The other 77% “violate the spirit of the policy, but not the letter,” a Meta presentation about the police reports notes.

... the spirit of the policy.... sheesh

[dalton99a]

6. Kick

[GenThePerservering]

8. Only NOW people are waking up to the fact

that we're all product? It hasn't changed, it's just been amplified.

[pecosbob]

10. Radio, television, films, magazines, newspapers...all advertising, all the time.

A veritable gilded age of deception and lies.