Is Any Of It Real?
A story broke recently about organised networks of real people being paid to manufacture online momentum for brands, musicians and more. Here's what's actually going on, why it matters for your business, and why the oldest marketing channels are having a quiet moment.
For what it's worth, I'm writing this of my own free will, unprompted and unsponsored. Which, apparently, is rare these days. Let me explain…
I was listening to the latest episode of the Shameless podcast, Oh, yep, that's fake too, where hosts Michelle Andrews and Zara McDonald discussed something that had genuinely shocked them: organised networks of real people, paid at scale, to flood social platforms with posts, comments and reactions about certain brands, artists and stories, not because they believe in them, but to manufacture virality and shape what the rest of us think.
Both hosts vulnerably shared that they felt like idiots. And we're talking about two world-class journalists running a global, award-winning media company. This is not a niche tactic either. It turns out some of the biggest chart-topping musicians in the world are doing this right now. Michelle shared that she had spent years noticing random accounts posting clips of podcasts with no obvious reason and just wondered about it. Turns out someone was getting paid to do it.
So what actually happened?
A marketing agency sat down at an industry event earlier this year and explained, quite openly, how they manufacture online momentum.
Real people are being paid to flood platforms with posts, comments and reactions. Coordinated narratives pushed before any real audience has formed an opinion.
A journalist at Vulture then spent weeks inside the online communities where these campaigns run and found paid activity for musicians, TV shows, betting platforms, major cultural events and more.
If you want the full story, the Vulture investigation and Eliza McLamb's response are both worth your time. But what I keep coming back to is the bigger picture.
It's not just this one agency
And this is on top of the bot-generated content that has been flooding the internet for years. We are already navigating an online world where sponsored content looks editorial, gifted products get reviewed as personal discoveries, advertorials are dressed up as journalism, and AI-generated images are passed off as real.
Paid networks of real people manufacturing sentiment is just one more layer on all of that, and most of us haven't caught up with how deep it goes.
The implications stretch further than marketing. Organised campaigns like these can sway public opinion, influence political discourse and manufacture outrage or support around anything, anyone, at scale. When it becomes genuinely hard to tell what's real from what's coordinated, that's not just a business problem.
And then there's AI. The tools increasingly shaping how people find information, make decisions and discover businesses are learning from the internet. If what they're learning from is significantly manufactured, the line between real sentiment and engineered sentiment blurs further. AI can't fact-check the feeling behind a post. It can only read what's there.
It's worth saying too: if these networks can manufacture positive momentum, they can just as easily be pointed the other way. Coordinated negative narratives, manufactured controversy, reputational damage by design. It's the same infrastructure, different brief. Which is why knowing what is being said about your brand, and where, matters more now than it ever has.
We've seen this before
If you've been in business for a while, this story has a familiar shape.
In the early days of SEO, agencies sold backlinks, paying other websites to link to a client's site and artificially inflate its credibility with Google. It worked, until Google got wise and penalised the sites involved, leaving business owners cleaning up a mess the agency had long since walked away from. We've written about this in detail here.
What's worth knowing is that many agencies are still selling artificial backlink schemes today, dressing them up as legitimate SEO and using vanity third-party scores to make it look like progress. The technique stopped working with Google. The sales pitch didn't.
This is the same playbook, different platform. The agencies profit while it works. When the platforms catch on, and they always do, it's the brand that answers for it.
What does this mean for your business?
A few things are worth thinking about.
If engagement can be bought, engagement as a measure of success means very little. Likes, views and follower counts tell you almost nothing about whether the right people are paying attention. The better question is whether your presence online is actually connecting with people who buy from you, refer you, or come back. Whether any of it is translating into something real.
It also makes a case for channels that are harder to fake. True journalism, the kind where I genuinely cannot promise you a journalist will run the story, because the moment I can guarantee it, it isn't journalism anymore. Billboards and outdoor advertising that put your business in the physical world, where nobody is getting paid to walk past it. Radio or TV ads that are clearly ads, no pretence. And real word of mouth, customers who recommend you because they want to, with no referral fee or kickback system in sight.
None of these are glamorous. None of them go viral overnight. But not one of them can be faked, and that is starting to matter more than it has in a long time.
And if you're ever tempted by a shortcut: history is very consistent on how those end. It works until it doesn't, and then you're left cleaning up a mess that was never worth making in the first place.
The businesses people will still trust in five years are the ones building something real right now. Slowly, without impressive metrics to show for it, with customers who found them for genuine reasons. It's the only version that lasts.
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