Today, Explained - Everything is clips now

Episode Date: May 20, 2026

An army of people posting clips of podcasts, songs, and movies has taken over your algorithm, which means everything you see could be a psyop. This episode was produced by Danielle Hewitt, edited by Jolie Myers, fact-checked by Gabriel Dunatov, engineered by David Tatasciore and Bridger Dunnagan, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Scrolling through X on a phone. Photo by Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. New Vox members get $20 off their membership right now. Transcript at ⁠vox.com/today-explained-podcast.⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The first post when I opened Instagram was a Slate post, and it is a clip of the Slate podcast, What Next TBD? But the guest is my boss, Nilai Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge. The products themselves aren't any good. What's after it? The next post is from an account called ProfG Markets. I believe that's a marketing podcast. I've never listened to it. Just like, look at this.

This is crazy. This is my normal feed. So there's Nilai. There's Taylor Lorenz clip. Here's I don't know who that is. Here's another clip. Remember when Instagram was like pictures of our friends sandwiches? That era is long gone.

They killed it. And it's been replaced by clips of podcasts? Yeah. Clips of podcasts, clips of shows, clips of movies, clips of sports. Clips, clips, clips. We're going to talk to me about that moron today, explained. From Vox! I'm supposed to say from Vox at the end.

What's up, y'all? I'm Skyler Diggins. seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years, covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us.

For years, if you ran a media company, you obsessed about Google, because Google could send a fire hose of traffic your way, but now things are changing. fast. So last year, I told all of our teams, you need to plan your businesses around there being no search. And if you don't have a plan for that, you may not have a business. I think it was very effective. That's Roger Lynch, the CEO of Condé Nast, the home of fabled magazines like The New Yorker and Vogue. And if you want to hear how Lynch is thinking about Google and AI companies and who's going to replace his most famous editors, good news. You can hear all of that on channels with Peter Kafka. That's out now, everywhere.

Today explained. I'll turn you into a damn owl, homie. I'm Mia Sato. I'm a senior tech reporter at The Verge. How would you describe what you and I just scrolled through on Instagram? It's basically like the TLDRification of the entire internet, because it kind of truncates everything we make, and it all goes down to we need a way for people, to discover our content. And right now, the way to get people to discover the content is to make

clips of it, no matter what it is. Think about the politics videos you see Trump giving a speech that Aaron Rupar is posting. Nothing bad can happen. It can only good happen. Or like sports highlights from the game the night before. Shamet puts it up. Puts it in. You see this with sort of every podcast becoming a video. I said, Cooper, what clone do you wear? When you say, bitch. I don't think so, honey, people who skip the museum gift shop? Oh. The major reason that happened was because they needed something to put on TikTok, right? To put on reels, to put on YouTube shorts.

Yeah. What made you want to write about this now? Because it doesn't feel necessarily new. The reason I felt like we needed to have a conversation about it is because of clavicular. Lovicular is a young man. He's in his 20s. He started posting on the internet as a teenager around when he was about 15 years old on these looks maxing forums, which are forums that are dedicated to making yourself as aesthetically perfect as humanly possible body modification. Oh no. I'm sorry.

I'm sorry. But it really is a great example to explain what's going on right now because it is beyond. just like we're going to make short videos of someone doing something. Clivocular is really a great example where sort of the point of his online existence is clips rather than the full live streams because so many more people are seeing the clips and actually watching the streams. They know him through these like disembodied short videos of this other thing that exists but relatively nobody is seeing.

Is he dead? I don't know. Hopefully. And what this is doing is creating micro fractures. And according to Wolf's law, the bone is going to grow back stronger. You have this person who comes from obscurity into getting like a 60 minutes interview. I mean, that's quite literally the worst sequence of questions I think I've ever heard. I kind of, you know, wanted to take this one example to illustrate a larger point about the nature of content on the internet and how people are working to go viral.

Is there a difference between, like, I don't know, the podcast clips that we talked about at the top of the show and like what clavicular is doing? Yes, absolutely. Clivicular is basically like the industrialized version of, you know, a podcast that is just posting its own clips organically. Because the difference is that there's an ecosystem under it that is paid. For like the month between March and April, I believe, there were like, like, a podcast that is. something like 1,600 clippers working on his behalf. Oh, my gosh. Generating tens of thousands of videos, billions of views,

and all of that is paid. People are paid to post this content and paid based on how many views the clips get. And so it is completely like a scale game. It's 100% like trying to take advantage of the algorithms of social platforms and these sort of anonymous, pseudo-anonymous accounts are profiting based on, you know, how much these clips are showing up on all of our feeds. How much money is there to be made here?

For my story, I spoke with one founder of a clipping farm, and he said, on average, a farm. And I'm very comfortable calling it a farm. He oversees like 62,000 clippers on his platform. Some people are making tens of thousands of dollars a month. He claims the average, I think he said, was around three grand a month. So, I mean, it's not nothing. Is it enough to have like a full, like support a family? Can you support a family on clips?

Maybe not. But brands are paying companies like this clipping platform. to basically say, here's 10 grand, make us go viral. What kinds of companies are paying for this service, or is it just all of them? I was kind of surprised by how many, like, household names were using this type of service. Rupal's Drag Race. Peppermint, you need one. There were clip campaigns for AI companies, like perplexity.

Oh, look how it generates it. I like that. Dan Bone Gino, former Second in Command at the FBI, who has now gone back to being a full-time podcaster. We can fight back or we can get dead. I found clipping campaigns that appeared to be for Call of Duty, the video game. Political candidates, which really gets weird. My new job for the next 18-month, probably longer,

is I have to be a social media influencer. So it really spans, you know, different industries. There's definitely a variety. I mean, we've been talking about the sort of mechanics of clipping, but then for the experience that we're having, I wonder, you know, when I'm scrolling through, say, Twitter, I know when something is being put in front of me that that's an ad, because it'll say ad. But I don't know when I'm seeing something organically or when I'm seeing something that's been paid to be elevated into my feet. And I imagine it's the same. same on Instagram or TikTok that you're seeing things that have been sort of pushed upon you alongside things that maybe have organically entered into your feed? Yeah. And I think one of the things that Clippers do is they make content that looks like it could blend in with organic content. So like one rule of thumb that I like to share is

you can probably picture it now. You're scrolling and you see a clip of the Joe Rogan podcast, The background is black, and on the black background, there will be a caption that's like, I can't believe bro said that. Shocked emoji. You know what I mean? I've seen that before and then watch the video and then nothing shocking is said, and I'm just like, I hate the internet. There's a really good chance that you were seeing paid clips. One of the campaigns that I found was promoting perplexity via Joe Rogan's podcast because perplexity is a sponsor of the podcast. And so these clippers were hired to pump out a bunch of clips of Joe Rogan talking about

perplexity. And it would be hard unless you checked the hashtags to see that it was a paid piece of content. Because buried in the hashtags, it says, powered by perplexity, hashtag sponsored. And even that is like a better example of a disclosure. A lot of this content has zero disclosure whatsoever. You would have no way of knowing if the account was paid to post it or not, including, like I mentioned, I had found some political candidates hiring clippers. There was a candidate in Florida, a GOP congressional candidate who was running a clipping campaign with zero disclosure, which is, from my understanding, against the law. So, yeah, it is really the Wild West because a lot of these companies are not disclosing that they're paying

these accounts. Can I read you? the most depressing pair of sentences in your piece that you wrote that I sent to many people to be like

how depressing is this? Yes, please. But over-indexing on the clipped version means eventually the full-length content is a means to an end. If clips really are

the present and future of media and reach online, one begins to wonder what justifies making the unclipped complete content in the first place.

That is really sad. Yeah, whoever wrote that. That's crazy. It is so brutal because some of these things that are being clipped are like artful. Yeah. I will say, like, I wrote those really depressing sentences because I feel this. You know, like, I'm a features writer. I write long things that are thousands of words long and are often behind a paywall.

I make clips of my stories. I do the short form video thing. I talk in front of my phone and explain my stories to audiences. And I know that very, very few people who watch that video will actually go and seek out my story and read it. I wonder if you think from having written this piece on the clippinging, as you call it, if this is just our moment or if this is our forever. For me, it's really hard to see an exit from vertical video because it is so not just ascend it, but like dominant right now. At the same time, I don't think anyone should completely put their trust into like the TikTok algorithm or the Instagram Reels algorithm because you don't want to put your trust into a tech platform that can change things on a dime and you will have no control over it.

I think the balance is like if you were someone who wants new people to find out about your show or your story or whatever, you maybe need to be on short form video. But how do you make it so the sad sentences that I wrote in my story do not become the reality? Where the clips are the justification rather than like creating the longer version, the real art or the real journalism or whatever. How do you avoid that as much as possible? You can read Mia's full piece and all of its glory at theverge.com. When Today Explained is back, we're going to talk about some real art that may have made its way into your feed that you maybe thought was a sciop, an industry plant, and maybe it kind of was. Support for Today Explained comes from Bamba's Spring is here, perhaps, you're going outside, running, walking, just to get active again. It's the perfect time to upgrade your everyday go-toes with Bamba's.

Bomba's sports socks are super comfortable and designed with sports-specific tech for running, cycling, yoga, hiking. You name it. They also make great basics, bombas underwear, and t-shirts are soft, high-quality, and breathable. Here's Nisha Chita. I would definitely recommend bambas to a friend. They're so comfortable. They're great socks. They have so many different colors and styles.

They really work for everything. It's not just about the comfy clothes and the accessories. Here's a reminder of their mission for every item that you buy Bamba's. says they donate an essential clothing item to someone facing housing insecurity. They say they've done this 150 million times in accountant. You can go to bombus.com slash explained and use a code explained for 20% off your first purchase. That's BOMBAS.com slash explained code explained at checkout. Hi, I'm Maria Sharpova, host of the Pretty Tough podcast. Each episode, I sit down with high achieving women to discuss the pursuit of excellence without apology. This week on the show,

comedian and bestselling author Chelsea Handler gives her tips on independence and age and gracefully. I would argue that 50, now that I am 50 and I understand life more than I did when I was 30 or 40, is that you get so much more wisdom and you get so much more experience that you actually feel like you're beginning again. Check out pretty tough. New episodes on Wednesdays. You can watch it on YouTube or listen in your favorite podcast app. Support for the program today comes from Vanguard to all the financial advisors listening. Vanguard wants you to listen up. Finding real value and fixed income isn't easy.

The bond market is enormous, as you know, complicated, as you suspect, and in a lot of cases, not especially transparent. Hmm. Plenty of firms will hand you a few headline grabbing funds and leave it at that, but Vanguard says they take a different approach. Vanguard says their bond offerings are built with institutional quality standards in mind, and for them that's more than just marketing language. It means giving advisors access to a deep lineup of high-quality,

products, including more than 80 bond funds managed by a global team of over 200 sector specialists, analysts, and traders. So, if you're looking to give your clients consistent results year in and also year out, Vanguard says you can go see the record for yourself at vanguard.com slash audio. That's vanguard.com slash audio. All investing is subject to risk people. Vanguard Marketing Corporation Distributor. I don't deserve this.

Today explained. Have you heard of the band Geese? They've been around for a while, but they got really big last year, and people started to believe their big moment was a sci-op, that people were constantly seeing clips of geese in their feeds because the band was an industry plant. It turns out there was something to that conspiracy theory. Spencer Cornhaber from the Atlantic is here to explain.

So basically this marketing firm, chaotic good, they started talking in interviews about how good they were at their jobs. We are looking for, like, underpriced, efficient places to put your songs where we think your audience will be. And their jobs, as they described it, was basically to create the impression that a band is more popular on social media than they maybe really are. We use the term trend simulation, which I think is useful. Who are important people in certain genres? like what are the niches, why did this happen? And so then we have a song that isn't naturally going viral, we apply that to it.

And so we say we're kind of simulating a trend. And the methods for that include operating a bunch of, quote unquote, ghost accounts that they can activate to show you happy fans raving about music or to post memes and have a certain artist's music in the background. They can swarm comet sections and sort of change the narrative. about what people are saying about an album. The song saved my life. Best drummer of all time.

These guys are so underrated. Screaming, crying, throwing up. They can make it seem like the internet is all raving about an S&L performance or a concert all at once. And the guys who founded this firm gave an interview to Billboard where they're talking about this really casually. This is just like, you know, everyday business and they're pretty good at it.

If you were building a new account, which we do many times a day, you would never post non-trending audios. It's worse practices. But artists have to. And so we view our job as kind of pushing against that and helping them. But to a lot of people in the music world, this was a really scary surprise. They didn't know this was happening or they didn't know what was happening to this extent. And then people went and looked at their client roster and they saw all of these names of famous and less famous artists on it. And geese was one of those names.

Let me dance away. Now, is that allowed? Is there anything untoward about that? Is there anything illegal about that? There are laws surrounding this sort of thing. They date back to the 1950s when there was the payola scandal, as it's known, when record labels were caught bribing radio DJs to play music on the radio they wouldn't otherwise play. And so since then, my understanding is that it's basically illegal to have undisclosed

sponsored content where you're paid to do something to endorse something without actually disclosing that. Now there's a gray area, there's a lot of gray areas around this. If you are doing something on the internet as part of your job and you put a song in the background, it's not always clear that you're being directly paid to endorse that song. And so I think that's the sort of loophole that a lot of these firms live in where it's not actually payola by the definition of the law. It's not payola because

you're not explicitly saying, hi, I love geese so much, you should listen to geese. I think that's right. You know, and a lot of these platforms like TikTok and Facebook have bans on undisclosed endorsements as well, but they're kind of poorly enforced and it's sort of hard to tell

what actually falls into them. Who else was doing this? Because it wasn't just geese. Who else was chaotic good claiming as, I don't know, one of their successes. All sorts of people. Justin Bieber. Duolipa.

Somber. Alex Warren, who had the biggest song like in the world last year. But also really cool indie darlings. There's a singer, OK-Loo, who makes really delicate, beautiful, intimate, weird electronic pop

that I feel like just me and my friends are obsessed with. It was very surprising to see that she was on this list too. Now, while you might think an up-and-coming, challenging, electronic, bedroom artists, whatever they might be, could benefit from this kind of marketing. Why does someone like Justin Bieber, who just headline Coachella, need a firm, like, chaotic good? We can only speculate, but if you think back to his Coachella performance that he just gave, what happened? He did a pretty, I would say, unusual performance. He was showing YouTube videos on stage and kind of walking around and not showing a lot of energy. Wi-Fi, man. Come on. And immediately the internet starts to debate whether that was a flop or a really brave work of artistic genius. Justin Bieber pulled off a very straightforward, very enjoyable run of songs from the new album cycle, Swag Swag.

too. And I just find it bizarre that Justin Bieber is okay being remembered for this. I imagine that a firm like chaotic good gets into that debate, activates its accounts, posts the best clips of the performance with people screaming about how beautiful it was. They go into the comment sections, I imagine, and seat it with more of a positive reception. And, you know, these sort of narratives matter to an artist's career. rounders a lot, whether in the eye of history and the public consciousness, Justin Bieber's thought of as has been or someone who's actually in the prime of his career. And so I imagine that that's part of what's happening.

You'd be hard-pressed to come up with a truly organic example of a musician blowing up just purely from the songs alone. Usually there's some dark arts of marketing involved in the rise of, you know, Anyone from like an indie band, you know, Nirvana to Mariah Carey to Beyonce, you know, they're all working with labels and distributors whose job is to make their music as popular as it can be. And people do that have changed over the years, and we're in an era where all sorts of new methods are being used to accomplish that.

But the fact that Geese was promoted, had industry connections, that there was a plan to make their music popular, shouldn't surprise anybody. So there's examples all throughout history of this happening, and there's also examples of there being backlash at certain points. You could go back to the 1800s at opera houses in France where there were these troops of people called the Clack who were paid to applaud during performances

so that they would inspire audience members to... be more engaged and to like the music more. Gustav Mahler, he banned the clack, you know, because he wanted to bring the sense of authenticity and seriousness back to the art forum. Tim Pan Alley, before even the advent of recording, really, before pop music was something that you listened to on a record when it was just sheet music that you bought at a store,

the way that Tin Pan Alley would market its songs was by paying people called pluggers, who were basically like street musicians or musicians who performed at public venues, they would pay them to play the songs of a particular publishing house, thereby hopefully causing people to want to go out and buy the sheet music for that music. You know, then I think about like the 70s where disco kind of is this insurgent musical movement coming from black and brown and queer people in urban centers, and then becomes this sort of corny, commercialized.

the pop spectacle that people got sick of by the end of the 70s, and you have the whole Disco sucks movement that's sort of rallying opposition to disco and wanting to move back to like a rar form of music, and people are smashing records in arenas. Fans stormed out onto the field in the thousands. Disco records were hurled like frisbee's. Bonfires were set, bottles were thrown.

Disco sucks! Disco sucks! So it just feels like this process plays out again and again over time. A certain sort of style of music comes on the scene and it seems like the more real art form and then money gets involved. People kind of wise up to the way they're being marketed to and the whole game resets again and again. So does that mean for all the people who are seeing questionable music marketing in their feeds and feeling dispirited that they need to not worry about it so much because within a year or two, they'll be a new way to manipulate your musical

taste. I kind of think that it is what will happen. It might not, it might take more than a year or two before you find the next manipulation tactic, because what we have to find first is the next thing that feels real. Maybe this is just me, but I'm at the point where when I go on TikTok or social media, I'm not trust in anything. I don't really like anything that seems like it was designed to go viral on TikTok. And that includes a lot of music that seemed really interesting and cutting edge a few years ago, you know, this sort of way. of bedroom pop singer-songwriters in the vein of Taylor Swift

or Olivia Rodriguez or Billy Elish. Now when I hear music in that vein, I feel like it's totally phony and derivative and just designs to manipulate the TikTok ecosystem. So what I think is that people aren't going to like that kind of music anymore for much longer or just will start to seem cheesier and cheesier. And people will gravitate towards some other way

of talking about and finding music. And I'm not sure what that is yet, but it's kind of an exciting juncture we're at, I think. That being said, do you think there's still ultimately, like, there's nothing a band or artist can better do to serve their success than, like, make good music? I think good music still matters a lot, yes. I think that's still the bottom line is that listeners in the end

have to listen to this music and like it. Even the founders of chaotic good in that initial interview that sort of kicked off all the scandal, they said, you know, we can do a lot of work to make a song trend on social media, you know, to push up its play count on TikTok. But there might be something about the song that people just don't want to listen to. And so it doesn't actually cause the song to be streamed more or people to download it more. It doesn't actually make the song popular. And I think that is, as I went, as I thought through this whole scandal,

I just was like, yeah, man, music is so cool. because in the end, you can't fake it. Like, you can't force someone to love a bad song. So I think that when I listen to geese, I'm trusting my ears, and my ears say that it rocks. Spencer's piece in The Atlantic is titled Music's Next Disco Sucks Moment is Near. He also wrote about geese last year. That one was called Finally a New Idea in Rock and Roll.

Danielle Hewitt made the show today. Jolie Myers edited Gabriel Donatow Factcheck, David Tattashore, and Bridger Dunnigan. Mixed. I'm Sean Ramosferm, and this is today explained from Vox with an F. Support for the show comes from Quince, of course. You might be looking to update your wardrobe, not because you don't like the way you dress, but the fact that you want pieces that feel easy, comfortable, and still put together. That's where Quince comes in. Quince has all the wardrobe staples for spring. Think 100P European linen, shorts and

shirts from $34, wow, that are lightweight, breathable and comfortable, but still look put together and clean 100% pima cotton teas with a softness that has to be felt. And Quince says that everything is priced 50 to 80% less than what you'd find at similar brands. Isn't that right, Nisha Chital? I got two sweaters from Quince. The cotton sweater is just kind of a big oversized sweater. You can put it on and it feels kind of effortlessly put together. It was a really smooth online ordering process and then it was at my door honestly faster than the shipping estimate.

You can refresh your wardrobe with quince. Go to quince.com slash explain for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada, too. Sub-Canada. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash explained to get free shipping and 365-day returns. Quince.com slash explained.