Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - Why You Cant Trust YouTube News: The Secret AI Farms Gaming YouTube

Episode Date: September 11, 2026

Who is really behind the fastest-growing political channels on YouTube? SUPPORT MY WORK: Buy a paid subscription to my newsletter at https://www.usermag.co         Support my work on Patreon: http://patreon.com/taylorlorenz To listen to the full episode and get access to more bonus episodes, an ad-free listening experience, and my weekly newsletter, subscribe to my Patreon or Substack 👇🏻Buy a paid subscription to my newsletter at ⁠https://www.usermag.co⁠         Support my work on Patreon: ⁠http://patreon.com/taylorlorenz⁠ Over the past few months, a massive network of sensational, formulaic channels has pulled in tens of millions of views by gaming the YouTube algorithm. They look like independent journalists reporting on breaking political news, but they’re actually "ghost creators" aka paid actors hired for as little as $26 on platforms like Fiverr to read AI-generated scripts full of exaggerations, rage bait, and outright falsehoods.Semafor media reporter Max Tani joins me for this week's Free Speech Friday to explain how these fake news channels operate, who is building them, why their videos outperform established media outlets, and how AI is transforming political misinformation into a highly profitable business. We also examine the rise of viral channels like New York Reports, William Reports, and other synthetic news anchors, YouTube growth hackers, and the older audiences being targeted by this content. As the next election approaches, cheap AI content and algorithmically amplified political videos could make it even harder to distinguish journalism from manufactured outrage. So please support my independent reporting by buying a subscription to User Mag!!  https://www.usermag.co

It's incredibly funny that just like one dude can spin up a bunch of these channels, immediately go viral, make ad money, and get more views and followers and whatnot than a lot of legacy media organizations too. Over the past few months, YouTube has been overrun with a brand new type of political content farm. Networks pumping out sensational, nearly identical videos are racking up millions of views. These accounts look like journalists delivering their own takes on news and current events. But many are actually ghost creators. They're quite literally paid actors or spokespeople hired off services like Fiverr to read formulaic AI generated scripts filled with exaggerations, misleading claims, and often outright

falsehoods. Max Taney is a media reporter on Semaphore, and he's been reporting the rise of these AI generated content farms and how this new kind of video business is cashing in on America's divided political system. Today, he's joining me to break down the rise of the ghost. creator ecosystem and how this new human AI hybrid content is warping the information that we all receive. Hi, Max. Welcome to Power User. Hey, thanks for having me. It's fun to be on this side this time. Yeah, thanks for joining me. You've been doing really great reporting, I feel like for the past year,

and obviously you've covered this sort of media landscape for longer, but on the rise of AI generated content and how it's sort of manipulating the political world. So when did you start to notice AI generated content, really infecting like the political? landscape. So earlier this year, I noticed that Donald Trump had posted a truth social video in which he said that all of the Walmart stores in California were closing and we're going away. And this basically made very little news outside of California where Newsom and some other people basically said, no, that's not happening. This is not true. We're not sure where he's getting this. But The notable thing about that story is that the story appeared to originate from a YouTube video from a synthetic news anchor, like an AI news avatar read some story on YouTube.

It got clipped and Trump, somebody showed it to Trump and he posted it. And this was just totally false. And at the time, I was like, that's kind of strange. it kind of popped on my radar and then I moved on to other things. But earlier this year, I got another tip that this was a lot bigger. This was kind of a part of a larger trend on YouTube. And it was something that I should dive into. And I found a number of accounts that were fake news anchor shows hosted by YouTube avatars.

Let's dive into what these accounts actually look like. Because I think we've all potentially encountered content that maybe is adjacent to this, looks like this. Content like this seems to be pervading YouTube at a bigger scale, even outside of politics. So what do these channels look like? And what are the names of some of the creators? Who are some of the characters in this universe? Well, there's a few different types. There's the totally synthetic content, which to me looks a little bit more like classic news anchor style, person behind a desk appearing to read a news story. It seems like, you know, AI has trained on a lot of these types of images and videos. And so it's not terrible. It's pretty good in some of the

some cases at replicating that. There's one with George Conway, which is like amazing, which I showed to many. I think we put it in our video. And then there's another type of content, which is this creator style direct to camera looking like I look in with my background here. And this was essentially what I wrote my article about for for semaphore. I at first found and was focused on all of the synthetic content and I wrote a story to this effect in early August.

But when I was reporting out that story, I found one set of videos by this channel called New York Reports. And this channel I had thought was using this incredibly good deep fake technology to kind of do all of these anti-Zoron Mom Dhani, Gavin Newsom, J.B Pritzker, the social, the mayor of Seattle, do a bunch of stories about this. But when I asked the producer of our podcast, Mix Signals, Manny Fidel, about this, I was like, hey, Manny, like, can you just like check and make sure that this is AI? because this looks like incredibly real to me, but, you know, Mani is good at shooting this type of stuff and went down a rabbit hole and looked at all these videos. And he was like, unless this is the best AI I've ever seen, this is a real guy reading these videos.

And it was strange because these videos existed on a channel that had other AI synthetic news content. And all of the scripts appeared to be formulaic. The B-roll was oftentimes nonsensical. It had all the hallmarks of AI except this one guy. who was real, who was reading these types of videos, and I thought it was just incredibly strange. I think this is so interesting,

because we're seeing this sort of like merge of synthetic content with real content, and increasingly, I just noticed more YouTubers generally reading AI scripts. Like, it'll be a human content creator. There's one channel called The Last Hike. I love all these like disaster Everest videos or whatever. And this guy is just like a human creator,

but he very clearly is reading ChatupD's scripts about these hikes. And as you said, sometimes an AI has sort of plopped in a bunch of weird B-roll. So I feel like we're getting this kind of mixed content. And I can only assume it's to perform better in the algorithm maybe, like by having a real person. Who are some of these people?

I think you talked about it in your story, this guy who operates a channel called like Omar's React. Yeah. Basically what I report in the story is there's this network of around a dozen channels that were doing this tactic, much like what you were describing Taylor, where they appear to be reading AI generated or heavily assisted. scripts, but the people on screen themselves are actors, paid actors. After I published my initial story back in August, I started talking to some researchers at Riddance AI, which is a company that focuses on this type of content and revealing these various AI networks that are getting

various narratives out into the world. And they told me that what I had stumbled on and written on with New York reports was actually what this tactic was, which is, you know, hiring these paid actors. They had found two specific actors, this guy who goes by the name Frank George. His channel is called William Reports, which had millions and millions of views on the same types of topics that were on the New York Reports channel, businesses leaving New York City, bad news for Zoran Mamdani, bad news for Gavin Newsom. And I found his YouTube channel, his own personal YouTube spokesperson channel where he shared all of his clips about being a spokesperson for joint cream and Q-tips.

and he played like a doctor or something in one of the videos. And then there's this other guy, Omar, whose real name is Kareem, who is a paid spokesperson that you could hire on Fiverr to do whatever. He has hundreds of good reviews. He highlights his Australian accent that he has. And so then I got in touch with these people and started talking to them. I was so fascinated by this channel. And you have this great chart that I'll put up on screen about the shared script

segments by persona and the amount of overlap in this network where there was, You harvested, you know, hundreds of transcripts from hundreds of videos and showed how this messaging was cross-promoted. And I also think it's interesting how much these accounts are using the language of journalism, like William reports the news, Julia News report, Omar's our show. I have encountered Freya Explains Politics. You know Freya. Okay. She's a character who's a part of this network as well. It's so interesting because when you look up, Freya explains politics, you get Victoria Explains Politics, which is a, channel that it looks like has pivoted. But there's Freya India who is a famous influencer and they've hired at least three

women to take on this persona. And the blonde woman who's screenshotted in your thing, it's like has been replaced by two other women, like a brunette and then like a muddy blonde hair woman. And they sort of seem to be capitalizing off Freya India who is a real person. It's so crazy like the rabbit hole that goes down these channels. And that one was just interesting to me because I was surprised to learn that she was a channel that's part of this now. work, I guess. But what you bring up is so interesting because it's not an unfamiliar tactic.

One of the points that we make in the story is that the guy who we reveal has some significant lead role in making this channel and is behind some of these accounts. His name is Caleb Chan. He had a channel called Geopolitical Caleb where he, at one point, he was posting videos himself as Caleb Chan. And at some point, he inexplicably swapped seemingly himself out for a guy who is now playing Caleb Chan, which is like very funny. But it's the same type of thing where it was like he was making them himself and he replaced himself with some other spokesperson for whatever reason. If you're watching this video and you like my work, please support me on Patreon via the link

below or buy a paid subscription to my tech and online culture newsletter at usermag.com. That's usermag.com. I don't have any long-term brand partnerships and a lot of my content is effectively demonetized. I've lost major brand deals for speaking out on certain issues and for challenging power. As you can imagine, advertisers are not exactly eager to work with somebody who covers a lot of the topics that I cover and talks about the things that I talk about. These videos I make are entirely funded by you and I can't continue to make them without your support. So if you get any value out of the videos that I create and you want me to be able to create more, please support me on Patreon or

Substack via the links below. On Patreon, I do bonus episodes, monthly Q&A live streams and post frequent updates about my work. My Substack newsletter gives you a bi-weekly roundup of everything that I'm seeing and reading and paying attention to online. You can also get my newsletter on Patreon. Once again, the links to everything are below in the description. Every dollar of your support makes such a difference. Yeah, it's just so fascinating. I mean, you also talk about this guy, Feldman's reports who started as like a blue MAGA liberal

and then evolved like the politics. So how did they coalesce around this like reactionary right wing ideology? Because it doesn't seem like they're that beholden to it. Yeah, that's a really interesting case. And that guy who is a part of New York report. had also been playing this kind of Midas touch, resistance anti-Trump style commentator on this channel Phelman reports,

which had some sort of link to that other guy, Omar, whose other name is Kareem. They had appeared together in this channel ZBH News, and there was a whole website around there, like news network or whatever, where they both claimed to be independent journalists. And it does make one sound crazy when you're explaining it. It is totally fascinating.

How these types of people just kind of like essentially pop up in these channels and then they go away and then seem to pop up again and clearly it's part of this ghost creator strategy that this guy Caleb laid out on his ex account before locking it. Well, you report so well about sort of this strategy in your piece and you write about his company Virolox and how they were sort of casting these creators. You cite this backstage casting call, which is so crazy. They're using backstage, which is how you just cast actors for a reliable and professional on camera spokesperson. for a news-related TV channel. This is a long-term opportunity with consistent high-value work. You will deliver news-style content on camera speaking clearly and confidently while maintaining engaging professional appearance. Turnaround time must be comfortably within 24 hours per video.

Access to a high-quality camera, microphone, lighting, et cetera, is required. And then you cite another posting that sought out a long-term African-American mail to record news commentary. And they're only getting paid $26 per video. Like, this is shockingly cheap. Yeah. And what they have discovered is essentially if they can get enough of these videos to go viral, that paying $26 a video per hit, which they are then, according to Kareem, hiring someone else to edit the videos, someone he said claimed to be in the Philippines. We were guessing that these videos weren't costing them more than like $50 per hit. And if you're doing around 10 million views per month, that's not insignificant in terms of the money. one could make if you're a solo operator operating all of these channels. And to go back to your earlier question, I think that they had kind of honed in on this anti-DEM

messaging. I stumbled upon a tool that they were using to track some of this stuff. And it really was concentrated in this particular area. I think that the reason that they were doing it was just that that's where they were seeing some success. The one notable thing about Feldman's channel is that even though he had a few videos that got over like maybe 150,000, 190,000 views. Eventually that energy just seemed to kind of taper off and the channel died. The last videos he made got 10 or 12 views or something like that.

Well, tell me a little bit more about what you found out about Caleb Chan. He started to respond to you, as you mentioned, he kind of goes to you, but you know in your piece that he took credit for the success of Cluley, the viral AI sort of like rage baits startup. And he seems like really enmeshed in sort of like growth hacking Twitter. It's like some of these people that I know from like the meme account days where they were just sort of nihilistically spinning up meme accounts. And now as you write in your piece too that Caleb at one point was creating two channels a day on average. So what is his life like? Who is this man? After we found the paid actors, Riddens found Omar and Frank.

I reached out to them and I started talking to him. And Frank, who's the guy behind William reports, told me that he was a paid actor and he didn't know who was paying him. He said he was being paid through a broker called Cascains. I did some research and some digging and realized that Cascains itself is a minorly popular YouTube channel where it talks about personal finance and stocks and tech. And it was founded by Caleb Chan, who was until very recently a University of Chicago student. Caleb since then has been diving into this growth hacking space, which I think you know pretty well. I wasn't totally aware of before, but it seems like it's basically this community of people who, who just want to spin up these channels really fast to go viral through whatever means that they can.

And they kind of trade ideas for what the algorithm likes and doesn't like. Sometimes they share some of the same complaints. In one of his posts, Caleb complained that YouTube was deprioritizing content about China. In another one, he complained and kind of got an online petition going saying that some of his accounts should be unbanned and that he'd been booted from a bunch of them unfairly. But he clearly in recent months started. to focus more on this news and political content. In addition to doing content on the side for companies like Cluley, who he said he was basically spinning up these ghost creator channels,

going viral through whatever means and trying to essentially raise awareness of various clients. He used Cluelly as an example of that. One interesting note as well and one link between these two kind of threads is that I found a video in which Omar, Kareem actually on one of his other channels talked about clearly. And I don't really know whether he was paid for that, but I thought that that was an interesting thread and connection. A lot of these guys are also adjacent to people like this guy Zuhair, Lacani, who raised a bunch of money

from Andrewsson Horowitz. Rebecca Jennings profiled him to sort of killed the internet with this army of AI influencers. I saw the founders of a pretty famous clip farm operation in this guy's comments. And it seems like there's all these discords where these young men, specifically I would say, 12 to 24 effectively just want to go viral and they will do anything to generate income on the internet and they're sort of nihilistic about it and it seems like especially in the past year a lot of them have realized that like news content performs especially well i mean i've written about the the rise of anti-a-i content as well which i see a lot of these slop farms adopting where they are feeding

people's justified anger about ai i'm not saying all anti-a-i sentiment is fake but it is these growth hackers, that they're just feeding people stuff they want to hear or whatever. And I'm curious, just as you've covered this industry, like, is this having a meaningful effect on the public's perception of certain issues, of news, of our political environment? Like, how impactful is this new ecosystem of viral slop? I don't think that younger people or internet savvy people are necessarily, I think that most look at stuff like this and they think this is garbage and ha-ha, isn't this kind of funny? or is it this like so incredibly stupid?

But there is clearly an audience for this among this type of content among older people who are spending more of their time on places like YouTube. One of the things that we found over the course of this reporting on this dashboard that I mentioned earlier that was tracking a few of these different channels that it had Cascains branding on it and it had internal analytics around the channels and how they were performing. So I strongly believe these were Caleb's measurement tools, themselves, all of these channels that were shared on this dashboard, which included William

reports and Victoria reports and Julian, 85% of people watching these videos were over 50, and the majority were over 65. And they were predominantly men, predominantly here in the United States. And so I don't know if this is necessarily like as influential as like legacy media or something like that, But it clearly is content that's being watched by a lot of older people, you know, who are in the comments. There were 90,000 comments on these types of videos. And the ridden skies looked into all of the commenters to see, like, were these real people? And they said that the vast, vast majority of them, they were acting like humans. They weren't synthetic.

So I think that a lot of older people are watching this stuff, which I think you think, too. Oh, 100%. It's old. Of course. I mean, I think anybody over the age of like 40 to 45, maybe even 50, like, certainly. like certainly over 50. There's something in their brain where I feel like not to be ages, but they like have a very hard time identifying AI generated content, like no matter what form it takes, even if it's this sort of like hybrid content. So again, maybe young people think it's cringy.

I think like a lot of the formatting of this content, I mean, you highlight some of the titles here and the updates, but it's like it's bait for older people. And it's like, Mom Donnie freaks out all caps as 52 supermarkets vanish before. Like it's meant to bait these like angry boomers. But at the same time, it is successful. Like it has reached people and also the amount of views that they're generating across this network are clearly making them a lot of money. And riddins who you mentioned before, you know, there are also this organization that reported on this, quoted the CEO of, I think it was Chris or another automation company that said, I could get Diddy in the White House if I wanted to. Attention equals power. Billionaires have money, but they can't change what people think of them,

unless if they had secret ghost creators like me. And they're correct, right? We do live in an attention economy and you see people on both sides of the political aisle, as we've both reported on as well, like trying to leverage this in their favor. Stories like this to me show how insanely behind they are, like especially the Democrats. They're doing their like chorus, like weird dark money funding program of like, hey, we're going to pay like the most benign sort of influencers with no organic audience to like make girl boss content with Chuck Schumer. Meanwhile, you have these sophisticated growth hackers like running these networks that are reaching so many more millions of people than any of these weird funding programs on the left or the right, I think, could ever hope to imagine.

Totally. And I mean, that was one thing that we were looking into initially. Was this being paid for by a political organization? And honestly, as far as we can tell, it really just seemed mostly to just be like one or a few solo operators spinning this kind of stuff up. I would imagine there's a discord where some of the people behind this are maybe talking about the story or sharing ideas and whatnot. But it's incredibly funny that just like, Like one dude basically or a few 20 somethings can spin up a bunch of these channels immediately go viral, make ad money, and get more views and followers and whatnot than a lot of legacy media organizations too, right? Like this network was doing way, way more viewership than people who are watching the Washington Post's YouTube or the New Yorkers YouTube or Semaphores YouTube very sadly, which I put in the story. I was texting with some people in Democratic politics who read the story afterwards and they were just.

like, I mean, what do we do about stuff like this, right? And what's going to happen in this space when the fire hose really turns on in a year when the election starts really, really kicking into high gear? And AI tools are better. It'll be really interesting to see. Well, so much of it, I think, and I'm not a fan of like regulating algorithms, but so much of it is, I think, due to the rise of algorithmic content. And you're talking about this in your own video.

But I think a lot more people, because we've moved from this subscriber model to this like kind of viral algorithmically driven model. People are comfortable seeing new faces. People encounter a lot more content from people that they don't know that they're not vetting. And this has just been like a huge boon for scammers and bad actors. It's totally true. There are these kind of two ideas that are both a bit in contrast, but happening at the same time in American culture and on the internet, which is people have deep suspicion and distrust

of media, of institutions. And people read a story in the New York Times and they think, well, We don't really know if that's true or not. It's in the New York Times. And they're sometimes they're right. Sometimes they're not, whatever. And yet, at the same time, also, they're consuming all of this content that's being served to them algorithmically from strangers and trusting it.

I'm thinking about this right now. I've been planning a vacation. And I'm going to be in Slovenia in like a week. And I'm being served all of this like Slovenian travel content. I'm getting tips from people I don't know who like, I have no idea whether they're paid by the country or by these hotels or by whatever. But that's how so much of how people are. are getting their information and they trust a lot of the people that come up in their feeds.

Also, it means that you don't have to have a built-in following already, right? You don't have to be Taylor Lorenz who has been building up your following, doing the work that you've been doing for 10, 15 years, right? Maybe more than that. You can just go viral immediately by, you know, doing some of these tricks to game the algorithm that Caleb was talking about on his Twitter and on his LinkedIn, you know, like posting the same data point across a bunch at the same time to kind of trick the algorithm into thinking that it's breaking news or doing

these sensationalist headlines about Zoran Mamdani freaks out like you were saying. I think that that's a really, really interesting change. And clearly Caleb is a smart operator and has picked up on that and it's changing media and changing the information ecosystem in really strange ways. Well, I think there's like hundreds, if not thousands of Caleb's is the thing too. There's this entire economy that sort of originated from like e-commerce, drop shipping, meme accounts, crypto. It's all kind of like tied in with each other.

And it seems hard to like kind of even regulate. Like what do you think is the solution for this like disastrous mess? Is it just people need to learn some media literacy? Is it these platforms need to be stricter about who they boost algorithmically? What is the fix? It's a really great question. And I don't really know the answer. YouTube understands that this is a problem, right?

And they understand that it's a problem particularly with synthetic content. They've started getting pretty good algorithmically at labeling things as, as AI that are clearly AI when it comes to the images, right? That was the first thing that I was kind of focused on. They also have this likeness protection program that people can, you know, if you're a public figure, if you're a journalist or a politician or CEO or whatever, that you can enroll in. And interestingly enough, it leverages the same technology that YouTube used to fight like its music piracy. Yeah. I don't love these systems because it creates further mechanisms for takedown of content.

It does. And that's exactly what it's meant to do, right? And so it is, it, you know, basically. basically, and we have this in our first story, that like Gavin Newsom is a part of this program. And he has like staffers who spend a decent, I think, amount of their time watching these videos to see which of them is manipulating in a weird way or making him say something he didn't say or whatever it is. I'm not really sure what the solution is here.

Better media literacy, I guess. I know, right? That's what I feel like it always comes down to him. I mean, it's just so depressing, especially as a journalist and you know this as well, like operating online. you are operating in this inherently broken media ecosystem trying to compete when the odds are so stacked against you. And from the point of these young people, at least the ones that I talk to in this sort of growth hacky world, it's like they understand all that. And their whole thing is like the world is broken.

I just want financial stability because that's all that ultimately matters. And I really don't care the effects that anything I do. I don't care if it puts Trump in the presidency, right? Like I just kind of want to make enough money so that I can buy my house in Bali and do whatever these growth hackers do. It's a part of the whole kind of like hustle culture and it's incredibly cynical. One of the other things that we found on this dashboard and some of the stuff didn't, I'm not sure how much of it came into the story, but there were a bunch of categories that the person running this tracker was following. Mostly they were focused on this kind of anti-democratic content as they described it.

And these channels were their most successful. But there were also tabs open that were tracking watch YouTube and like Home Depot YouTube, which I guess this person thought was kind of a thing, which maybe it actually actually. actually kind of might be. Maybe you would know better than I would. I'm very on home YouTube. But there's all these different content categories, right? Like this is happening in news and politics, but it is proliferating out all over. And you just see like I mentioned, these like hiking channels where it's just clearly a human being reading AI with AI. And it's just it's harder and harder to understand like what is the motivation here other than just sort of money.

And I think that's it. I mean, there are other things that YouTube could do in terms of monetization, I guess. Like there's incentive here to create these videos like people like Caleb wouldn't be this space if YouTube wasn't making it easy to monetize. But again, it's like there's very, very little that differentiates this type of stuff than creator kind of content. I don't even know if they were like violating any types of rules that YouTube has currently by making stuff like this. I mean, like you said, any law that you may or any rule, right, like YouTube and act that would restrict this content would also restrict actual journalistic content. And so many journalists use AI all

the time in their creative process or in their work process, mostly because they're single operator entities that are strapped for resources. So yeah, it's a really tough problem, but your reporting is really great on it. And I'll link your article below and the written investigation as well. And I can't wait to see the next sort of horror that comes out about all of this. Thanks for having me, Taylor. I know I said that this was funny and I've been laughing a lot, but obviously it's incredibly, it's incredibly dark, but strange and funny. So thanks for let me come in here and talk about it. Yeah. Thanks for coming on. All right, that's it for this week's episode of Power User. If you like my work, please, please buy a paid subscription to my sub-sac at

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