00:00The New York Times report says campaigns are paying social media influencers thousands of
00:04dollars to promote their candidate and message. The problem is influencers are not always making
00:09it clear that they're being paid. The midterms are right around the corner. And over 40 million
00:14Americans have already cast their ballot. While candidates race across swing states for final
00:18rallies. It's good to be back in Detroit. The real battle isn't happening on cable news or town hall
00:23stages. It's playing out silently in the digital economy. Of course I'm voting blue. Of course I'm
00:28a Democrat. But in all seriousness please go vote. I will be voting today. The way you consume
00:33information evaluate candidates and ultimately cast your vote has been completely re-engineered.
00:38This ad is 100% fake. The pack that paid for it is hoping you won't care. And it starts
00:45with a
00:45multi-million dollar digital network engineered to buy your trust and create algorithms designed
00:50to dictate what ends up on your feed. Our country needs to prioritize AI regulation for many reasons
00:56but one of them is because if we don't the 2028 election cycle is going to be an absolute slog.
01:04This isn't a conspiracy theory anymore. It's a documented business model. This creator has been
01:08lying over and over again about getting paid to make videos for political candidates. In late August of
01:142026 investigative reporting exposed how political campaigns are quietly funneling cash directly to digital
01:20creators. So all of these posts are breaking Michigan state law. Take progressive creator Josh Green.
01:27A Democrat is lying and pretending he has the endorsement of none other than AOC in his bid
01:32for re-election to Congress. Green built his following on raw authentic political commentary.
01:37In this country you have to choose between spending thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to
01:43save your life or die. But federal election commission records reviewed by the New York Times
01:49revealed he received over $21,000 linked to a single candidate's committee. I spoke recently with
01:55progressive billionaire Tom Steyer on my quest to meet with as many candidates as possible and I asked
02:01him straight up should billionaires exist? Even worse? I went viral for calling out Tom Steyer,
02:07Democratic candidate for California governor, about his past investments into private prisons. This all happened
02:12right as his content shifted to feature that exact candidate. Can you talk about what you would do
02:17in response to that type of situation? Look it's not just that 1.3 billion dollars that they are taking
02:23away from us for unspecified corruption. All without ever disclosing the cash to his followers. And I
02:30will be officially endorsing former congresswoman Katie Porter to be California's next governor. Green
02:36eventually defended the payout claiming he only accepts funds from candidates he already supports. But
02:41Green is also just one creator and a multi-million dollar digital payroll. Normally we'd show you
02:46Avery Cyrus's paid promo but it seems the influencer in question deleted her political content right
02:52after the Times inquired. Which brings up the question how does a super pack buy your feed without
02:57triggering federal alarms? This money doesn't buy votes it buys ads. Welcome to the laundromat. Then you have your
03:05501c4s. These are going to be your social welfare organizations. For dark money nonprofits. Now dark
03:11money doesn't mean illegal money. It just means political spending where the original donor isn't
03:17publicly disclosed. Tax loopholes allow these groups to collect unlimited cash from anonymous donors and
03:22pass it straight into specialized digital talent agencies. So when the pack files its public campaign
03:27financial reports, the creator's name never appears. It's logged as a lump sum payment for quote digital
03:33consulting. And the real genius and danger is the regulatory blind spots. A lot of people are getting
03:38their politics from short form videos and stuff. Because if a beauty brand pays a creator to hold
03:42up a moisturizer without disclosure, the Federal Trade Commission can slap them with penalties exceeding
03:47$51,000 per violation. But if a super pack pays that same creator $10,000 to drop political talking
03:54points into their morning routine, current FEC regulations leave a massive gray area. The public
03:59deserves to know whether or not a post from a social media influencer was authentic and organic,
04:05or if it's really just paid political advertising. To the algorithm, it's content. To the campaign,
04:11it's an untraceable political commercial disguised as real life. Get ready with me to go vote. And if the
04:16dark money is the fuel, how do campaigns keep everyone on message without committing illegal campaign
04:21coordination. This is where we bring in red boxing. By law, candidates cannot coordinate directly with
04:27independent super PACs. To bypass this, campaigns post talking points, raw footage and script directives
04:33inside a highly visible red box on a public website. Today, red boxing has evolved into the core engine
04:39behind Clipper culture. This second experiment was used to run political campaigns in a European country and it
04:47changed an election. And within 15 minutes of a rally, independent Clipper networks pull the raw
04:51assets, strip away context and bold kinetic captions so they can flood the algorithm. Most content creators
04:57you follow are able to get this sort of mass, you know, hysteria or thought pattern that they want to
05:02portray onto you because they pay Clippers to clip something. And over time, that narrative just becomes
05:08true because most people fall for these narratives very easily. As detailed in recent investigative
05:14coverage from the Atlantic, operations like elephant clipping optimize armies of young editors across
05:19discord. All you have to do is post on social media video clips. Unfamiliar with US politics? No
05:25problem. To simply go into Gemini or chat GPT, he suggests and be like, yo, Gemini, I want some video
05:32promoting Republican values. Give me ideas. These editors receive the raw footage and narrative guidelines,
05:38earning performance bounties, sometimes up to $300 per million views. And these operations run
05:44monthly pools ranging from 120,000 to over $900,000. I'm probably going to get kicked out for saying
05:50this, but I need you to know that someone is paying nearly $8,000 a week to get Ben Shapiro
05:55videos
05:55views online. And to bypass platform filters, overseas editors route uploads through US proxy servers.
06:02So it looks like a spontaneous grassroots enthusiasm is industrial scale algorithmic astroturfing.
06:07What I've learned is there's good clippers and there's evil clippers. Leaving generative AI to
06:12distort reality entirely. I am super proud. Because welcome to synthetic politics. A drag queen who goes
06:19by the name Nova says her image was used in an AI generated attack ad against congressional candidate
06:25Jamie Ager. Data from the Westland Media Project shows political groups have poured over $137,000
06:31into more than 220 AI generative or AI enhanced midterm ads. And roughly 70% carried zero explicit
06:40disclosures. Meaning we've moved past harmless memes. I'm voting for Healy because she looks out for
06:46cronies like me. In Massachusetts, a radio spot deployed an AI voice clone of Governor Maury Healy,
06:52delivering statements she never made. In Texas, attack ads use synthetic audio manipulation on candidate
06:57James Tallarico to alter his cadence and fake admission. They'll never see us coming. And across
07:03local races. Slopaganda from AI generated political figures promoting fake products to visual deepfakes
07:08is actively reshaping candidate profiles under the guise of satire. Leaving us to ask you,
07:13why is the strategy dominating? Well, we think it has something to do with traditional cable news being
07:18dead for young voters. I never in my life have watched Dancing with the Stars, but I have seen
07:22every single one of Alex Earl's performances. I know every single competitor on the show and their
07:29partners and all of the team behind the scenes. And I'm not alone. This is literally how Gen Z is
07:34watching TV. A comprehensive Syracuse University study confirms YouTube has officially overtaken broadcast
07:40and cable TV as a primary platform for political news. My Birkin. Another Birkin. But what makes these
07:48two Birkins different and what small feature about them divides the Hermes collector community? And
07:56over 61% of Americans now trust independent news creators as much as mainstream journalists. Plus,
08:02Gen Z and millennial voters are abandoning rigid party loyalty, choosing instead to follow single
08:06issue creators who analyze tech policy, open source AI, privacy and housing economics. Because these are the
08:13things that matter to those generations. And Capitol Hill sees the writing on the wall. Through
08:18initiatives like the bipartisan Senate Creative Caucus, politicians are ditching Sunday morning
08:22talk shows to appear on gaming streams and subculture podcasts. And cable news didn't lose its audience
08:27by accident. When I went to school, I learned surprisingly little about some of the world's
08:31most important events. But I had to challenge my teacher on Germany's invasion of Poland because
08:35they got the history wrong. And now we have a generation that rightfully doesn't trust the
08:39institutions that are meant to be informing us. But we also don't always have the historical
08:43knowledge to know when information is misleading. So what do we do? We open TikTok, we find someone
08:48we agree with, and we call it research. So if the FTC is powerless, the FEC is blind,
08:54and the algorithms reward synthetic rage, where does that leave you? Well, it leaves you in the
08:59crosshairs of the most sophisticated psychological operation in political history. Because when you
09:04deconstruct the modern digital landscape, what looks like organic social behavior breaks down into three
09:09engineered mechanics. First, you have the scripted signal. This is when the influencer isn't
09:14delivering an honest personal opinion. They're pulling verified talking points directly from a
09:18public red box. Then there's the foreign bounties. I think a year and a half ago, we had someone build
09:24a bounties app. And what we saw was that a lot of people were making bounties around posting content.
09:31And then the market was solely focused on payment for views. And it just kind of exploded.
09:37The viral momentum isn't spontaneous. It's a paid creator or foreign clipper collecting a $300 bounty
09:44per million views, leaving the manufactured friction. Two months after Charlie Kirk's assassination,
09:49the government of the blue and white country posted a video about him. Turns out that video
09:53was part of a $56 million campaign to influence young conservatives and push their narrative.
09:58The outrage isn't real all the time either. It was calculated, rendered, and seeded inside a discord
10:04server to trigger the algorithm's engagement loop. So the midterms aren't just being fought for your
10:09vote. They are being managed, funded, and run by a secret influencer network engineered to control
10:14your feed. And until campaign finance laws adapt to the digital age, the dark money laundromat will
10:19keep running in plain sight disguised as real life. So have you noticed your favorite creators shifting
10:24to political talking points lately? Share this report to keep your feet honest and subscribe to keep up on
10:28what's trending.
