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.” …
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.
It seems that this is more of the ‘clipping’ deal. I avoid video clips. They’ve gotten so horrible.
To the folks concerned that lemmy is manipulated or even dead … we ain’t big enough to be concerned about.
If lemmy was truly successful, we would see more if this crap. Mostly, we don’t. Because we are nothing.
Instead we just get political psyops, for some reason.
I mean, the kind of person who will actually notice the coercive nature of the governing structures of other platforms and seek out a different space like this one here tend to be ornery. There are some bad politics sometimes to be sure but I think they’re organic.
Yes and no. There are quite a few bots that most of the time will post feeds some sites that generally have left leaning material, but every once in awhile it will post something with just the right keywords to make it really obvious it is some russian psyop shit. It is this kinda sneaky shit that I don’t appreciate. You can see this with the abolish.capital, or indigenous and green or whatever shit. Plus, lots of anti israel sentiment that is justified, but will sneak in shit like “NATO-backed”. No one talks about NATO other than fuckin russian shitheads. It is just so obviously stirring the pot.
More and more every day it seems!