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.
The point of this kind of marketing is that nobody is supposed to notice it. But lately, the machinery has started to show.
In April, Justin Bieber headlined two consecutive weekends at Coachella. 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 writer Lane Brown had been monitoring hosted paid campaigns for Bieber’s Coachella performances, offering clippers — people who are hired to turn a song, trailer, interview, stump speech, or whatever into short, social-media-friendly fragments — as much as a dollar per thousand views.
“On social media, popular opinion is being formed, measured, and manipulated all at once, and every signal the platforms produce — a trending song, a backlash, a talking point, the feeling that ‘everybody’ is suddenly talking about the same thing — can now be fabricated by unseen actors with hidden agendas,” writes Brown.
“Everybody is doing this now,” Lim says. “And if you’re not, you’re behind.”
Brown reports on how the same techniques are now being used to fool people on every app they go to in order to find out what other people think, not just in music but across entertainment, politics, consumer products, and celebrity gossip: https://t.co/hlcdfSmzPc
My latest for @latimes: I travelled to southern India to document the rise of the AI "arm farms" — where young engineers strap GoPros to their foreheads and fold laundry or pack boxes to teach humanoid robots how to do chores.
https://t.co/o6dgEtbuEN
The brand value and engagement experienced by Vogue because of a Black British woman writer hired as a freelancer and not a staffer is yet another example of how Black creatives are worth more than these media institutions pay them.
Ive always had this feeling that people at the top of these fields simply aren’t intelligent enough for their position and it’s a big reason the uk is so stagnant. I’m astonished at the lack of reading the room and more so just priorities. Fucking hell
My favorite D’Angelo anecdote is that he was so obsessed with Red Dead Redemption that he not only wrote a song for RDR2 but playtested it constantly and all the time