Everything's probably fake now

The national meltdown over clipping that started at some point between Clavicular overdosing and the band Geese being branded a psyop has, like all things in America, officially become a moral panic. Everyone is suddenly convinced that every conversation online is being astroturfed. Not exactly a bad way to operate, considering how rotten are feeds are lately, but, still, it’s become a bit of a baby with the bathwater situation. New York Magazine and The New York Times both published big stories over the weekend interrogating the authenticity of the content on our feeds. According to New York Mag, everything we see online these days is probably fake. And according The Times, that’s doubly true for anything political.

Amid the backlash against fake video views, users spent the weekend dogpiling New York Times reporter Joe Bernstein, claiming that he was somehow tricked by clippers into writing a big feature about Clavicular back in February. Bernstein told Garbage Day he has been covering the looksmaxxing subculture for years at this point and Clavicular was a big fixture in those circles long before he was streaming (and being clipped). That said, Bernstein thinks the clipping conversation is long overdue.

“It's good for the public to know about this,” Bernstein said. “We know the algorithm has been manipulated. That people are messing with the algorithm to make their stuff more popular.” But Bernstein was also quick to make a point that I’ve made here several times. “If anyone could become a viral star through clipping, you know, they would,” he said.

What has made the discourse around clipping so scrambled is that it’s both flattening a bunch of different viral marketing strategies and, also, only one downstream effect of a much larger issue plaguing the web right now. This is something esports commentator and journalist Rod Breslau jumped into my DMs recently to (rightfully) argue with me about. Clipping started among pro-gamers and livestreamers he told Garbage Day and has recently morphed into an unhelpful catch-all for everything. “We are absolutely at the inflection point now that short video is being pushed and monetized so much since the launch of TikTok and then Shorts that it's all the same thing,” he said. An entire broken, even fraudulent, media economy propped up by a handful of major tech companies.

But the top-level discussion, especially among mainstream media outlets, is still largely stuck on misogynist livestream clips and marketing firms larping as fans of Netflix shows or whatever. But the entire internet — well, the four biggest apps we use to navigate the internet — has, quite suddenly, morphed into a horrible new version of television, seemingly programmed entirely by low-paid worker-users in the global south. Fake fans and fake shares abound, as every social media platform starts to devolve into some bleary combination of 9GAG and WorldstarHipHop.

Kick streamers play a part in this new world of slop, of course, but it’s much bigger than them. Though, thanks to Kick streamers like Clavicular and N3on just… sharing their clipping stats and budget, we have a working idea of how much money is being sunk into shortform video at the moment. Using N3on’s video metrics we can do some back of the napkin math and say that it currently costs about $1 million a month to generate around 600 million combined views across 35,000 videos. Roughly, $28 a video or about $1 per 600 views, depending on how you want to look at it.

Which is a much bigger budget than what mainstream media outlets can spend on their own shortform video. Probably why the glut of pearl-clutching clipping features from big outlets sound so panicked. British reporter Jim Waterson revealed over the weekend that between March and May he made about £140 for 1.5 million views on his TikTok channel. Considering the clips that livestreamers (and Hollywood studios and music labels and politicians) are paying for are, by definition, not original content, there’s basically no incentive to risk doing anything original on TikTok. These shadowy clipping operations are also not trying to make individual videos go viral, but instead trick algorithms on platforms like Instagram, TikTok, Youtube, and X into thinking that whatever is being clipped is part of a larger trend and promote it accordingly. It’s the big box store effect, but for digital video.

Missing from this whole conversation, however, is any kind of insight about why someone would clip — or even just share these clips — in the first place. How do those aforementioned low-paid worker-users look at all of this? It’s something I’ve been desperate to learn more about.

Over the weekend, I came across what looked like, to me, a tweetdecking or clip-sharing operation run out of Rwanda. A group of Verified users all sharing random viral videos with one-line captions that, almost always, don’t make any sense. I reached out to a few accounts and one user, going by @whotfisrw, actually got back to me.

@whotfisrw identifies online as a student at the University of Rwanda, but they told Garbage Day that sharing video clips is their job. They said they often get paid to post videos and that the bulk of those offers come from AI companies. “Usually it’s either a fixed payment per post or a short-term promo arrangement depending on reach and engagement,” they said. They declined to share how much they’re making from sharing videos. Their X account is tagged with Ryne AI, a “humanizer” that can “pass” AI detection software like Turnitin and GPTZero. They said it’s more of “affiliation,” rather than “a full corporate thing.”

They said they got Verified “mainly for credibility and branding” because they wanted their account to look more “established and trustworthy.” As for where they get the videos they’re sharing, aside from paid posts, they said they usually just reshare whatever they see on X. “I mainly post directly on X, though sometimes I source clips or inspiration from other platforms and communities,” they said. “I do interact and collaborate with other accounts sometimes — mostly through reposting each other’s content, sharing ideas, or helping boost posts.”

It’s all, ultimately, not that deep. “If you're underemployed and you're just spending all your time watching the internet all day anyway, like this is a con. This is like a way you can make money, for sure,” Bernstein said.

But also none of this even new. Shadowy digital marketing firms and scammers and propagandists have been flooding the zone with shit — and been paid to do so — for over a decade now. The only thing thing that is new, I’d argue, is that there are more users now like @whotfisrw than there aren’t and, apparently, a whole bunch of young internet users who seemed to have been believing everything they saw on their video feeds up until like a week ago.

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On May 8th, a Russian woman named Alexandra Kuzyk was sentenced to 18 months in a labor camp for posting gay fan fiction. Even though the fanfic was free, it was found by a court in Yekaterinburg to be illegal pornography. Ever since 2023, when Russia declared the country’s largest LGBTQ advocacy group to be an extremist organization, they’ve made multiple efforts to criminalize anything gay on the internet.

Naturally, the biggest question on my mind was, “can I read this criminally gay fanfic?” Russian state news reports noted Kuzyk was writing about the K-Pop band Stray Kids, but didn’t give any other details. Luckily, Kuzyk herself spoke to the Russian queer news website Parni Plus, which noted the title of the fanfic and the site where it was posted. That site was Ficbook, the largest Russian-language fanfic site on the internet, with millions of stories and comparable web traffic to some of the country’s biggest news websites.

Ever since Ficbook was blocked from Russian ISPs in 2024, it’s had strict limits on anything with queer tags, so Kuzyk’s fanfic isn’t on the site. But since it was popular enough to get legal attention, there were outside links that led me to an Internet Archive backup of the table of contents and the first few chapters. Reading a machine translation, I didn’t have to get very far to find this was a college AU omegaverse story, where Stray Kids member Hyunjin is an alpha and his bandmate/classmate Felix is an omega (look it up if you really need to). This of course means Kuzyk’s case is the second legal case involving omegaverse, and has ended with a much worse result than the first for all the pheromone fans out there.

Fifteen years ago every major social media company decided to adopt a new way to measure the success of their apps. This was disastrous mistake that has basically turned the internet into a nightmare gooner world where everyone is completely insane all the time. This is video is how the time-on-site metric devoured the internet.

lol I wish I could say that the digital video implosion — or whatever you want to call it — was almost over, but there’s a lot happening in the space right now. If you’re wondering why, we’ve basically hit a point where tech companies feel like they can finally topple Hollywood. Specifically, YouTube. I actually don’t think they can and that it’s possible that YouTube will have to hard pivot back to being not-TV very soon, but it’s interesting to watch them — and their users — try and make a go of it.

Kristen Stewart told reporters at Cannes this weekend that she wants to just start releasing weird short films on the platform. Stewart said she was, like many actors, sick of waiting for studios to take risks on anything. Bloomberg has a good piece this week about YouTubers like Subway Takes’ Kareem Rahma, who recently started airing a TV-quality show called Keep The Meter Running on YouTube. And British YouTuber Look Mum No Computer just competed in Eurovision.

That last example is an interesting one, actually. Look Mum No Computer, who I am a huge fan of, has nearly a million subscribers on the platform and he couldn’t translate that audience into a single vote in Eurovision. He came in last. It’s a bit of a unique story, Eurovision is probably not a great venue to flex a YouTube following, but definitely something to consider as more and more stars decamp from Hollywood to the platform.

The Boys ends its fifth and final season this week. The show has had a fascinating relationship to both its own fans and the internet, at large, for most of its runtime. Its largely male audience had be scolded by showrunner Eric Kripke back in 2022 for empathizing so much with its villain, the sociopathically violent Trump-stand-in Homelander. And, now, as it wraps up, fans are mad again that the show is, well, kind of blowing the ending. I’ll reserve my personal judgment until after the final episode drops, but Kripke was the showrunner on Supernatural, which had such a horrible finale that fans of that show came up with the concept of “turbo hell.”

Well, it seems like the stars of the show have finally had enough of it. Both Karl Urban and Laz Alonso jumped into the comments of an Instagram Reel from some dweeb complaining about season five and pointed out you can’t be mad that The Boys is full of dick and fart jokes when your Instagram handle is literally “@soupypoopy69.”

OK, I’ve seen this rumor a bunch and I am starting to believe it…

P.S. here’s a good Drake song.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***