You know those obnoxious social media accounts that flood your messages with spam? Those might not be scammers after all, but a legitimate new business backed by one of the most powerful venture capital funds in Silicon Valley.
Introducing Doublespeed, a startup operating a phone farm to flood social media with AI-generated slop on behalf of its clients. In a nutshell, phone farming is a tactic most often used by hackers and financial criminals to use large numbers of devices to send spam texts, farm social media engagement, or generate fake reviews.
On its website, the fledgling company bills itself as a “bulk content creation” service. Basically, it lets customers “orchestrate actions on thousands of social accounts through both bulk content creation and deployment.” It does this through “instrumented human action,” a fancy phrase meaning the company’s phone bots will somehow mimic “natural user interaction on physical devices to get our content to appear human to the algorithims [sic].”
In a post on X-formerly-Twitter, Doublespeed co-founder Zuhair Lakhani even boasts that they used AI to write the company’s code. “Claude code is truly our third cofounder,” he wrote.
The whole thing is backed by a $1 million cash injection from a16z, also known as Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capitalist firm founded by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz back in 2009.
Doublespeed clients can expect to pay anywhere between $1,500 and $7,500 a month for access to its phone farm.
As 404 Media notes, the service is obviously a violation of the terms of agreement for the top social media platforms. Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook for example, prohibits posting, sharing, or engaging content “at very high frequencies,” and specifically disallows “selling, buying, or exchanging for engagement, such as likes, shares, views, follows, clicks, use of specific hashtags, etc.”
X, LinkedIn, and Reddit have similar policies, though it’s becoming increasingly unclear if any of these platforms are particularly interested in actually enforcing policies against spam bots. Users on each site have grown more and more frustrated lately as AI-powered bot accounts are allowed to infest every last corner of the internet, an issue which tech critic Cory Doctorow calls “platform decay.”
Ironically, many of those platforms are also being eaten away by AI-powered content moderation — a cost-cutting strategy which saves tech companies the hassle of outsourcing content management to sweat shop workers in Africa.
Oddly enough, it may be one of the peak signs of our time: a million-dollar gamble on a for-profit company whose entire model relies on monetizing spam. Who said capitalism has to breed innovation?
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