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Your Feed Is the Product of a Stealth Marketing Campaign

vulture.com · 5,083 words · saved by 1 readers

That “viral” song, movie, influencer, and celebrity drama you scrolled by recently was likely the result of a stealth marketing campaign.

Illustration: Rob Vargas This article was featured in New York ’s One Great Story newsletter. Sign up here . 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 maj

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