'Everything on the internet is fake': Social media marketers reveal that most online trends are fabricated

Much of the internet is advertising in disguise, according to digital marketers who have worked with some of the biggest names in entertainment.

The information backs the popular Dead Internet theory, which alleges that most of what is seen online is populated mostly by bots, not actual human accounts.

'Popular opinion is being formed, measured, and manipulated all at once.'

A recent interview with Joe Lim revealed the disturbing truth about the online marketing industry. Lim told Vulture that he ran a company called Floodify, which positioned itself as an agency that spreads content "organically."

However, Lim told the outlet that 90% of online content is advertising, a lot of which he did himself. At his company's peak, he controlled 65,000 dummy accounts on social media in order to fake trending content for paid clients.

Lim said he promoted music for all the major record labels and worked with top celebrities, saying that he garnered 40 million views for an artist who only had 100,000 followers.

A Billboard interview from late March revealed much of the same. Co-founders of digital promotion agency Chaotic Good Projects Jesse Coren and Andrew Spelman said they promoted artists' songs by getting them plugged into fan pages, meme pages, and sports clips as the background music.

Spelman called the tactic "trend simulation" and used the motto "everything on the internet is fake."

At the same time, Coren added, "I don't know if this will make anyone feel better, but a lot of what we do on the narrative side is controlling the discourse. ... That first comment [users] see becomes their opinion, even when they haven't heard the whole album."

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New York Magazine noted that a writer named Lane Brown has been monitoring paid campaigns for artists like Justin Bieber. Lane said the idea or the "feeling" that everyone is talking about or seeing the same thing organically is a product of online manipulation.

"On social media, popular opinion is being formed, measured, and manipulated all at once, and every signal the platforms produce — a trending song, a backlash, a talking point, the feeling that 'everybody' is suddenly talking about the same thing — can now be fabricated by unseen actors with hidden agendas," Brown said.

According to Vulture, these campaigns come from the labels or studios and even political operatives; it could be anyone. They hire a company to turn their content into clips by sending it out to a network of editors, who then push the material out to "normal-looking accounts."

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All of this lends credence to the Dead Internet theory, which has its basis in the fact that internet traffic from bots surpassed human traffic in 2016. That view has been perpetuated well into the modern era, with some now stating that simple bots have been taken over by AI bots, with AI bots reportedly growing by more than 8,000% since 2025.

As for Lim, he shut down his company after he accidentally posted the same video to 7,000 accounts, which he said got them all banned.

Lim said people will soon stop trusting social media — he claims in three to five years — and his plan is to start distributing content through AI, which he believes will find a way to convince humans of what they want.

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