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The Internet is dead. Long live the Internet.
wow... honestly, reading the Twitter feed for Zuhair ("CEO" of DoubleSpeed) makes me sick. https://x.com/rareZuhair and https://www.zuhair.io/.

If you want more photos of his phone farm... it's all on his twitter page: https://x.com/rareZuhair/status/1961160231322517997

"Accelerating the dead Internet"? Why are we, as a community, encouraging the acceleration of enshitification of our common spaces? So weird to me...

My god, horrific. Does not everyone know everything online is a psyop now? I will tel you, they don't. No one studies things, no one takes the time. AI, social media, it all has to be protested, boycotted.

Now it seems war is coming from the US it could not be more true that at this moment.

This feels not very different from the recent report revealing how Nick Fuentes has a lot of artificial likes and comments on videos that push his content, due to a large following that responds to commands delivered via Telegram etc. A VC backed corporation using a large phone farm to manipulate the public is no better than Nick Fuentes.
How long until the company gets sued by X/Meta/Tik Tok?
"Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind."

Seems like the Butlerian Jihad is arriving ahead of schedule, and the real horrors demanding the uprising aren't oppression and violence, but viral marketing and sockpuppetry.

WTF happened to a16z?

They used to be at the pinnacle of the VC sector, and now they seem to actively seek out the most toxic portcos possible.

Why isn't this company sued for computer fraud and abuse?
AI is pretty much killing social media in the long term. Even pre-AI, a good chunk of posts/comment sections on sites were bots/paid. Reddit is becoming less believable than ChatGPT. I guess there's still the Onion-verse.
why was the original title edited to remove the reference to a16z? why hide investment into socially unacceptable product? if you are going to be a scumbag weasel, own it.
> The hacker, who asked for anonymity because he feared retaliation from the company, said he reported the vulnerability to Doublespeed on October 31

Lmao. Nice.

Actual title: "Hack Reveals the a16z-Backed Phone Farm Flooding TikTok With AI Influencers"
Streisand effect?

A mod changed the title to something other than the originally submitted original article title, to protect a major VC.

Not cool.

And it’s been shunted to the third page as of 8:20 AM ET the next morning. Really interesting behaviour going on.
I checked out one of the accounts mentioned, mostly to check if I can discern fake accounts. The content is just still pictures. I'd dismiss those whether or not they're AI. Well, I'm not on TikTok anyway.

This reminds me of some youtube videos when I was researching some stuff to buy. Those videos are just still images plus text-to-speech narration, usually with an annoying background music.

Hack reveals that startup is doing exactly what it said it was doing

Okay, is this just an ad then?

(comment deleted)
As the submitter, I want to point out that I submitted this post with the original title. The one that makes it clear a16z are behind the social media astroturfing. The mods changed the title.
Hilarious - i was literally just telling someone that im seeing no end of ads for vibit, and the dozens of glowing comments looked fake to me.
So this is the reality we're living in now, where bot farms have become normalized? I always associated bot farms with authoritarian regimes like Russia and China, but are we becoming the same thing? And VC funds are actually backing this? I hope I'm not the only one who finds this completely insane. I can't even listen to the a16z podcast anymore; my mind now permanently associates them with bot farms. These are the news that makes me think does people ever think about moral values and ethics.