by Lane Brown, a features writer for New York Magazine
That “viral” song, movie, meme, influencer, and celebrity drama was probably the product of a stealth marketing campaign.
May 15, 2026
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.
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What all of this amounts to isn’t 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 — 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 wasn’t discouraged. When we last spoke, he was building a new company and thinking even further ahead. “All 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.” By then, the job will have moved one layer up. “You’ll have to start distributing your content toward AI agents and then they’ll teach humans what they want.”
remaining paragraphs might get pasted as child comments, according to my estimation of whether any of the fluff between the first and last was also worth reading.
remainder of comment quoted verbatim from Lane Brown, features writer of New York Magazine
“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. 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 “trend simulation.” His motto: “Everything on the internet is fake.”
Chaotic Good’s interview went viral the old-fashioned way: by making lots of real people mad. Some were appalled by the cynicism of the company’s 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 group’s unexpected ubiquity. Wired called Geese’s success “a psyop,” which triggered Paste to defend the band in a piece headlined, “Congratulations, You Discovered Digital Marketing.” 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.
But the fight over Geese missed the larger point. The issue wasn’t really whether one rock band had been fraudulently foisted on unsuspecting listeners. It was that the same techniques that Coren and Spelman bragged about onstage 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. Shady marketing and propaganda aren’t new, of course, but what is new is that the entire infrastructure of public conversation has been quietly captured by both. 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. We’ve locked ourselves in the stupidest possible version of Plato’s cave, where what looks like the spontaneous consensus of the hive mind is often just shadows on the wall, put there by marketers, political operatives, foreign-influence campaigns, or anyone else with a few hundred bucks and something to sell. “Everybody is doing this now,” Lim says. “And if you’re not, you’re behind.”
gee thanks! a link post, with neither context nor commentary; AKA opportunity to do something useful, rather than zap and scroll unto inevitable doom
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remainder of comment quoted verbatim from Lane Brown, features writer of New York Magazine