There's a very good chance that your social media feed is now overrun with video clips

There's a very good chance that your social media feed is now overrun with video clips that are essentially stealth marketing campaigns masquerading as fan submissions. That's the premise of Fake Fans, a now viral essay on Substack by Eliza Mclam that exposed clip farms in the music industry and how they've recently organized into professional agencies. But many articles about clipping have popped up since Mclam's piece broke, like The Clipping in The Verge, a profile on Anthony Fujiwara in Forbes, and The Feed is Fake in Vulture. A rudimentary explanation of how clipping agencies work is by hosting long-form pieces of content like podcasts, interviews, primetime series, or live performances via a central server where users can then chop those up into clips. The clients are record labels or performing artists or Hollywood studios. And as far as paid ads go, this is cheap because the clippers are paid based on views, not on labor. That also means the clippers are incentivized to produce brain rot of the most addictive variety, and they are masterful at producing content that rips through the algorithms. But therein lies some profound legal, artistic, and ethical issues. First is that they are adeptly skirting FTC ad disclosure guidelines, which bans undisclosed social media posts that mimic those of actual users. Fines of 50k can be applied per violation, but at the astronomical scale of the burner accounts distributing these clips, fraud enforcement is going to be tough, and the agencies are banking on that. The second is that this stealth flooding of feeds is designed to mimic the appearance of organic virality, despite the fact that it's quite literally the antithesis. It's sponsored content, but you don't know it. And as Mclam reminds us, engineered virality often spurs real virality, which then gets picked up by journalists and misidentified as actual movements. The last issue is more of an existential one, and maybe it's just my own, but I think when we're trained on successive moments of high emotion and climactic action, we lose the necessary stamina it takes to follow a full story from beginning, middle to end, boring character development and all. We've always known that feeds are highlight reels, but now the question is, who's the secret sponsor?