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TRANSCRIPT

Erin Ryan: It’s Monday, June 1st. I’m Erin Ryan in for Jane Coaston and this is What a Day. School’s out, or almost out, for summer. And what have we learned this year, class? 

[clip of President Donald Trump] Because most people don’t know that, you know, dumb ends with a B, but most people don’t know. And all I do is I switch the E with a U, and you have a Dumocrat. 

Erin Ryan: This is what happens when you don’t hire union writers for your portion of the roast. [music break] On today’s show, President Donald Trump’s walk-back weekend had not very much winning, but a lot of whining and waste. We’re also going to cover escalating protests and government crackdowns outside of an immigrant detention center in New Jersey, and Congress returns this week. Whether or not its members have found their respective spines hiding in their home districts is TBD. But let’s start with a conversation about a piece of long-form journalism that confirmed what a lot us suspected about what we see on social media. It’s all choreographed. We’re each the star of our own micro-Truman show. Well, kind of. Writing for New York Magazine, Lane Brown’s piece uncovers the world of artificial hype that drives what we perceive as buzz. The piece dominated the group chats these last few days and for good reason. It taps into a general unease about how we’ve seeded our reality to platforms that are manipulated by shadowy ad campaigns. No wonder Backrooms is killing it at the box office. Here’s my conversation with Lane Brown. Lane, welcome to What a Day. 

Lane Brown: Thank you, Erin. Glad to be here. 

Erin Ryan: Well, since the early days of social media, people have been trying to figure out the algorithm, how to make sure the maximum number of people are seeing whatever it is you’re posting. I’m a web native, so I’m familiar with the beast of the algorithm as well. What do we know about how social media algorithms work today? 

Lane Brown: It seems like they’re simpler than I think a lot of people imagine. It uh they’re, it turns out, highly gameable, uh really easy to manipulate, and, you know, it doesn’t seem like they are actually as smart as you kind of hope they would be. 

Erin Ryan: Yeah, well what are some of those ways that you’ve discovered that people are influencing and manipulating the social media algorithms? 

Lane Brown: So I just wrote a story about this thing called clipping, which is basically if you want to promote something, uh, maybe it’s a song, maybe it’s a video podcast, maybe it’s a movie trailer. You chop it up into tiny, like social media friendly pieces and you post it to social media platforms via like thousands of normal looking dummy accounts. And when you do that, it basically tricks the algorithms, tricks the recommendation systems of these platforms into thinking that there is a real organic spike of actual human interest. And so when that happens, it pushes these clips onto the wider user base and people think, oh, wow, other people must be watching this stuff and so therefore it’s popular. And so uh places that are doing this, the people that are doing this are paying, basically it’s a dollar per thousand views, which is a pretty great deal. And so now just basically everybody’s doing that. 

Erin Ryan: Okay, so as I understand you stumbled onto this by accident, like the fact that our reality is being shaped by a kind of like molten candy center of manufactured bullshit. Can you tell me a little bit about how you discovered all of this? 

Lane Brown: Sure. So for the past couple of years, I just sort of had this feeling, just as I’m reading the internet every day, something was off about the way things would go viral. Like probably mostly in music, uh things would just sort appear out of nowhere, songs and artists and then dominate my feed and then sometimes go away. But there was never sort of really any explanation for why this was happening. And, you know, probably a lot of people reach their forties and think that exact thing. Like, I don’t understand why the kids are into this these days, why this is popular. Something must be going on. But it turns out I was the only 40-year-old person who was actually you know the first one who was actually right about this. It turns out there was something going on. I started reading about clipping last fall and it like as I kind of got deeper into it, it felt like I was basically like peeling back a layer of reality a little bit. I could actually sort of trace, oh, this is why that artist was all over my feed a month ago. Or this is what this movie trailer is just sort of inescapable right now. And so uh that’s kind of how I sort of stumbled into this. 

Erin Ryan: Hmm. So what are the mechanics of how this actually works? Like, how does somebody become a clipper? How does somebody launch a campaign? How does that all go? 

Lane Brown: So a lot of this happens in communities like Discord. Uh. And so basically there will be a clipping company, a clipping agency that will sort of say to their clippers who are just normal you know teenagers looking to make a buck, uh you know here’s this clip of uh Shania Twain or Fleetwood Mac or the Michael Jackson movie and say, clip this up in any way that you want, uh but try to make it go viral. And they’ll basically compete to do that. And they’ll have a few days to sort of download the original clip, chop it up into however they want, post it, and then, you know, sort of pray that their one clip will sort of be seen by hundreds of thousands of people. And so uh some of these some of these clippers actually make a pretty decent living. I talked to one of the founders of one of the agencies who said that his top clippers make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year doing this. 

Erin Ryan: Oh my gosh. 

Lane Brown: Yeah. We’re in the wrong business. Yeah. 

Erin Ryan: Yeah, seriously. Oh. I just blacked out for a second. Um. In your piece, you talk about how marketers use these methods to promote movies and songs and even Coachella sets, paging Justin Bieber. Did you find any evidence that they’re being used in politics as well? 

Lane Brown: I did. So I spoke with a guy who ran this company called Floodify, which is one of these companies that does this sort of exact thing. And he told me, he was asked to do a version of this for Eric Adams when Eric Adams was running to be reelected as mayor last year. He basically wanted to run a campaign against uh Mamdani. Uh. Spencer Pratt is just in LA right now clipping it up. He’s running, you know, it’s pretty easy to find his clipping campaigns, they’re they’re out there. Uh. A couple of weeks ago, there was a clip of Marco Rubio talking about how much he loved America at a press briefing. And it turns out that was you know pretty obviously the result of a clipping campaign. It sort of went viral. And it’s like, in what world is a clip about Marco Rubio talking about how much he loves America go viral, you know, the natural old-fashioned way? Somebody put their hand on the scale here. You know, so many people have figured this out that now if something is in your feed and you’re like, how did this get here, there’s usually a pretty easy answer. 

Erin Ryan: Mm. We have seeded our perception of reality to platforms that can be easily manipulated. Um. The internet brought up a lot of conversations about media literacy, you know, you can’t believe everything you read on the internet. Knowing uh now that you may not even be able to trust Buzz or anything you read on the Internet, how can people discern the conversations that are authentic from the ones that are manufactured, or is it hopeless? 

Lane Brown: That’s the scary thing. So, yes, some people have, you know, like, oh, this is you know this is just advertising. Oh congratulations, you’ve discovered digital marketing or something. This is not that. This is a category change. Ads are supposed to look like ads. Until very recently, they did. Um. You know, you watch the Super Bowl and, okay, the Doritos commercial is obviously an ad. If you’re really savvy, you that, okay, there was like Payola and so sometimes songs get played on the radio because record companies made sort of shady deals. But this is advertising that is basically disguised, camouflaged uh to look like the real sort of spontaneous like chatter of real people on the internet. And so the scary thing is there really is no good way to tell this apart from, uh you know, the real thing. So it’s uh it’s scary and journalists are really no better than normal people at sussing this out. They may even be worse because we are in our feeds all day looking for, you know, looking for ideas. And so maybe normal people have a leg up on us. Because they’re hopefully not exposed to as much of this. 

Erin Ryan: Right, and we’re not, they’re not always trolling for what the popular thing is, and the thing that is influencing what we think the popular thing is is something that is manufactured. Um. But, you know, when I was a kid, I’m like of the TRL generation, I think probably you are as well, and you know buzz during that era, we’ll just say MTV for example, was manufactured and there were gatekeepers, but it was a lot more out in the open. Like MTV decided what music videos we’re gonna watch, like record companies, you know, there was there was a lot of like mechanisms happening behind the scenes and some of which we probably will never know about, you know because they were so dark. Is there something more insidious about the way things are now? 

Lane Brown: Definitely. I mean, like I said, a savvy person kind had their was able to wrap their head around that. They knew that MTV and radio and uh you know that kind of stuff was sort of captured a little bit by major record labels, that somebody had an influence over what you were seeing and hearing. This is different because this is faking the fans. This is like if somebody walked up behind you, like if the record companies had like hired actors to like follow you around and sort of, you know, try to have you eavesdrop on them telling you about a new artist? Like, that’s basically what this is. This is like a whole new, like Truman show-esque kind of level of creepiness where they are basically imitating real people sort of talking about this. And the idea is that you will sort of see other people talking about this and then wonder, boy, maybe I better you know find out about this because it seems to be you know uh something that other people seemingly like me are interested in. 

Erin Ryan: Yeah, I mean, this is this is like, this article just completely blew my mind when I read it because it kind of reflected things that I was worried about as well, because I was like, why, there’s no way that this person is as popular as they seem to be on the internet. There’s no way, but the New York Times is doing a profile of this person, so they must actually be popular. And now it turns out that the mechanisms underneath it are just, no, the very beginning of their popularity was a coordinated campaign. They are they are popular because somebody decided to pay for their popularity. Are there a couple of famous examples of people that you know have have broken through this like fake feed buzz and into legit media? 

Lane Brown: Yeah, I mean, it basically every influencer that you can think of in the last, you know, however long, it’s like Mr. Beast has his own clipping farm that is just sort of pumping this out. And so he, I you know, he was sold to me, at least as like, you know he’s the most popular person who has ever lived. He’s, you know, Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise and Julia Roberts sort of wrapped into one person from YouTube or something. And it’s a, like that’s not the, not really the necessarily the case at all. Like we’ve heard that, you know the Manosphere is just like this massive massive thing that’s you know, gonna come and, I don’t know, kill all of our children or something. And it’s like, there’s uh that may be a lot smaller than we think, because basically a lot of the Manosphere influencers of the world, including Andrew Tate, who may have actually sort of kicked off this whole clipping trend, uh you know have basically managed to really exaggerate their own popularity. And so a lot of the a lot of the trick here is like, it’s not just to fool other real people, it’s to fool the gatekeepers like us uh to into sort of basically amplifying this this message. And so it’s a it really is kind of insidious in a in a kind of dark way. 

Erin Ryan: So your favorite celebrity is just three kids in a trench coat, essentially. 

Lane Brown: A bot farm in a trench coat, yeah, exactly. 

Erin Ryan: A bot farm in a trench coat. That’s great. Lane, thank you so much for joining me. And if you haven’t read his piece, please go read it immediately. It is astonishing and brain melting. Thanks so much. 

Lane Brown: Thank you very much, Erin. 

Erin Ryan: That was my interview with New York magazine feature writer Lane Brown. His piece is linked in the show notes. We’ll get to more news in a moment, but if you like the show, big news, we’re going to be in your feeds just in time for Golden Hour starting June 8th. Think of us as an evening news program that Bari Weiss can’t ruin. So make sure to subscribe, leave a five-star review on Spotify and Apple podcasts, watch us on YouTube, and share with your friends. More to come after some ads. [music break]

[AD BREAK]

Erin Ryan: Here’s what else we’re following today. 

[sung] Headlines. 

Erin Ryan: President Trump, when he’s not learning about the B in the word dumb, has been taking more Ls in rapid succession than the Cleveland Cavaliers. On Friday, a federal judge moved to freeze Trump’s proposed $1.8 billion so-called anti-weaponization fund. Per NBC News, the ruling states that the Trump administration cannot transfer money into the fund, consider any claims, or give out any money. In other words, they have concepts of a fund. Also on Friday, another federal judge ruled that Trump cannot add his name to the Kennedy Center for the Arts and blocked a planned two-year closure for renovations, a plan many observers clocked as a cope since it was announced after artists began canceling gigs at the iconic performance venue and subscribers and donors began to flee. Speaking of Trump stinking up the arts, over the weekend the president threatened to completely cancel the planned Great American State Fair concert and replace it with giant MAGA rally. This after basically all the headliners pulled out in quick succession once the event’s lineup was announced last week. The artists claimed that they’d been misled about the partisan nature of the event, including Martina McBride, whose most famous song, Independence Day, is about a woman who sends her eight-year-old daughter to the fair in town on Independence Day so that she can blow up the house and kill her abusive husband. Let freedom ring. 

[clip of Governor Mikie Sherrill] Let me be clear. ICE engagement creates an incredibly dangerous situation. It makes the situation worse and I refuse to back down in fighting the Trump administration and the threats they’ve made. 

Erin Ryan: That’s New Jersey Democrat Governor Mikey Sherrill speaking to the press on Saturday after a series of intense clashes between protesters and police outside the Delaney Hall ICE detention center. The mayor of Newark also imposed a curfew early Sunday around the center. The move came after another night of standoffs between law enforcement and demonstrators at the facility, as protesters could be seen in photographs and videos fighting over barricades as police used riot shields to push them back. The high-profile demonstrations at Delaney Hall began earlier this month after advocates said detainees inside launched a hunger strike over poor living conditions at the 1,000 bed facility. Voting began Sunday in the first round of Colombia’s presidential election. Citizens there face a choice between candidates with radically diverging visions for the future of peace in a country haunted by decades of armed conflict. The vote is expected to send a message to Latin America at a time when voters are increasingly ditching leaders that pitched progressive policies and turned instead to heavy-handed security crackdowns, like in El Salvador. It also comes as the Trump administration is placing renewed pressure on the region. There are 11 candidates running for president. The three front-runners are Senator Iván Cepeda, an ally of the current left-wing President Gustavo Petro, lawyer Abelardo de la Esprilla, and Paloma Valencia, both of whom want to take a more aggressive approach to dealing with armed rebel groups. President Trump sat down for an interview with his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, the Walter Cronkite of Mar-a-Lago, where he talked about the status of his Iran war. And even with the softest softballs of questions, he can’t even keep his own talking points straight. 

[clip of Lara Trump] So what does a good deal look like for you? 

[clip of President Donald Trump] Well, first of all, there’s no deal that’s good enough, because the media will cover it, and we’re making a great deal. We’re gonna make it a great deal, or we’ll just go back and finish it off militarily. Their military, we’ve sort of left it alone, because we think that their military is somewhat uh somewhat moderate. Well, we’re winning Iran. It’s a total win for us. I mean, we had to do it. Look. Two things were there were number one, the Strait has to be opened immediately and it has to be free, no tolls, etc., etc. And we don’t need the Straits. [?] Look, we have a war going on in the economy as well. We have a war going on. I’m in no hurry. I’d like to say I’m in a hurry because, you know what, gasoline prices are going to come tumbling down, but if you’re going to be in a hurry, you’re not going to make a good deal. And uh slowly but surely we’re getting, I think, what we want. And if we don t get what we want, we’re going end it a different way. 

Erin Ryan: Okay, sir, lay off the European Sudafed. Both houses of Congress will be reconvening early this week after the Memorial Day recess. Republicans’ first order of business is a roughly $70 billion bill to fund immigration enforcement through the remainder of Trump’s term. The bill should have been an easy lift for them, but progress stalled over concerns about the inclusion of White House ballroom security funding in the package and the creation of the aforementioned $1.8 billion dollar slush fund. House Speaker Mike Johnson has a thin margin of error, but Johnson said he’s confident this summer won’t be as difficult as last. Quote, “it will be just as beautiful but not as big, so it’ll have less provisions and less things to get everybody to yes on.” And that’s the news. [music break] Before we go, starting June 8th, your What a Day episodes will be hitting YouTube and your podcast feeds early enough for your evening commute, but not so late that the day’s news ruins the whole night. If you enjoy this show, you know the news never stops, so this new publishing time brings you the freshest updates and analysis on the news you need to know before you tuck into 6,000 relentless hours of Love Island content. If you aren’t already, be sure you subscribe to What a day on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify and follow Crooked Media on socials so you never miss an episode. [music break] That’s all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review. Please stop clipping blockbuster horror films and posting them on TikTok because both Obsession and Backrooms have been spoiled for me several times over. And tell your friends to listen. And if you’re into reading and not just about the rules of the one wish willow like me, What a Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at crooked.com/subscribe. I’m Erin Ryan, and please support original films even if TikTok has spoiled them for you. [music break]

Jane Coaston: What a Day is a production of Crooked Media. Our show is produced by Caitlin Plummer, Emily Fohr, Erica Morrison, and Adriene Hill. Our team includes Hayley Jones, Greg Walters, Matt Berg, Joseph Dutra, Johanna Case, and Desmond Taylor. Our music is by Kyle Murdock and Jordan Cantor. We had help today from the Associated Press. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. [music break]