The Feed Is Fake

"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.”"

"“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."

"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 cl"

A marketer estimates that about 90% of what people see online is advertising disguised as ordinary user activity. For three years, Floodify operated 65,000 dummy social-media accounts and posted tens of thousands of videos daily across major platforms. The goal was to make promotional content appear unscripted and user-generated. The service was used for music promotion for major labels and for political campaigns, including AI-generated influencer videos. The practice relies on audiences not noticing the manipulation. Recently, “trend simulation” described by a promotion agency went viral, provoking backlash from people who were angered by the cynicism and deception.

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