Doublespeed hacked, revealing what its AI-generated accounts are promoting
45 comments
·December 17, 2025boh
AI is pretty much killing social media in the long term. Even pre-AI, a good chunk of posts/comment sections on sites were bots/paid. Reddit is becoming less believable than ChatGPT. I guess there's still the Onion-verse.
cgh
Yes, Dead Internet Theory went from joke to reality in what feels like overnight.
themafia
I'm not convinced you can have an impromptu global conversation to any positive end. Humans are not well suited to this task and an unsupervised mostly anonymous forum plays to those weaknesses and provides no support to generate positive outcomes.
It was never a particularly good idea at the scale it's currently deployed at.
nickphx
why was the original title edited to remove the reference to a16z? why hide investment into socially unacceptable product? if you are going to be a scumbag weasel, own it.
tolerance
Looks like this is a report on how the company just…handles its business: https://doublespeed.ai/
jfindper
>"never pay a human again."
>"Take proven content and spawn variation."
It's almost refreshing how unashamed they are. I hate it, obviously, but I kind of like it better than companies that say something dressed up in marketing speak but actually mean what this site just says outright.
aunty_helen
Controversy is currency. Businesses literally try to track and optimise virality these days as part of their marketing.
ryanjshaw
How does one profit from this farm of AI content on TikTok?
ronsor
Advertising and shilling, just like normal influencers?
nickthegreek
Immorally.
Probably moves like affiliate/referral linking, client paid campaigns, cpa lead generating arbitrate at scale, product seeding.
coffeebeqn
Wow I thought this type of business was illegal or at least a very gray area conducted on the dark web but looks like the VCs at this point have no morals left. Gambling? Amazing. Spam? Take my money. Ad fraud? Yes please
exasperaited
A16Z is basically funding toxic fungi growing on the face of society at this point. So much of what they do seems to be a bet that people will want to pay money to do antisocial things and avoid the consequences.
lawlessone
> So much of what they do seems to be a bet that people will want to pay money to do antisocial things and avoid the consequences.
Yes but they also stand to make money offering services to counteract the services they offer.
fuzzfactor
Some people are naturally talented financially, and can make as much money as they like without doing anything to anyone else's disadvantage.
And then there's everyone else.
moomoo11
A lot of people are against the current social media tech it seems. I wouldn't be surprised if they're funding the acceleration of its collapse to see what can come next.
New generation is less social, more sober, less motivated, more doomer.
jonas21
Yeah, it's basically free publicity for them.
UncleMeat
Holy crap. They really are leaning into "evil supervillain" advertising copy.
ajross
"Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind."
Seems like the Butlerian Jihad is arriving ahead of schedule, and the real horrors demanding the uprising aren't oppression and violence, but viral marketing and sockpuppetry.
2OEH8eoCRo0
Why isn't this company sued for computer fraud and abuse?
gruez
Because using the CFAA as a cudgel against things you don't like, whether it's journalists exposing insecure government systems, or companies engaging in deceptive marketing practices is a bad idea? For the latter, there's already laws against it that doesn't involve CFAA, eg. https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-16/chapter-I/subchapter-B...
SilverElfin
This feels not very different from the recent report revealing how Nick Fuentes has a lot of artificial likes and comments on videos that push his content, due to a large following that responds to commands delivered via Telegram etc. A VC backed corporation using a large phone farm to manipulate the public is no better than Nick Fuentes.
jbm
No need to bring up the boogeyman of the day. Reddit was literally kickstarted with fake comments. (Frankly I'm convinced that most of its political comments are fake too.)
ipython
wow... honestly, reading the Twitter feed for Zuhair ("CEO" of DoubleSpeed) makes me sick. https://x.com/rareZuhair and https://www.zuhair.io/.
If you want more photos of his phone farm... it's all on his twitter page: https://x.com/rareZuhair/status/1961160231322517997
"Accelerating the dead Internet"? Why are we, as a community, encouraging the acceleration of enshitification of our common spaces? So weird to me...
qingcharles
He's doing it for the ragebait, but the sad thing is the product is totally real. Cory was right from the start.
neilv
He sounds like an intelligent but misguided teenager. Maybe he's not a bad kid, and just needs better role models than the companies he mentions.
If we never do things that later make us cringe and want to correct, we're not reflective and self-critical enough.
mlsu
He just got a $1 mil series A. Better role models? He is a role model, at least in the society we've decided to build.
ipython
FWIW, I agree with you. I think that great role models are sadly in short supply these days.
thephyber
I don’t think they are in short supply, but the vast majority of them aren’t the super-successful so we don’t see their names often.
They are the teachers, coaches, and engineers. The problem is the anti- role models are the ones who get all of the media:
Andrew Tate (mysogenistic pyramid schemer and pimp / sex trafficker of high school girls),
Joe Rogan (his mind is so open that his brains fell out),
Jordan B Peterson (charlatan who dresses up banal self-help advice with pseudo-intellectual jargon to seem profound, drug addict who is still taking very big risks with his health, frequently argues strawmans by misrepresenting postmodernism, Marxism, atheism, etc).
Our heuristics of who we should look up to are skewed because too many young people revere wrath and fame over ethics, morals, and values which may hold us back from success.
thephyber
The risky thing about creating this tool is that someone will inevitably use it against the creator, the employees, and the investors.
Noaidi
It is not weird, it is greed and control.
bpt3
WTF happened to a16z?
They used to be at the pinnacle of the VC sector, and now they seem to actively seek out the most toxic portcos possible.
neuroelectron
Once you have infinite money, you tend to want infinite power next
bpt3
I don't disagree, but lighting money on fire hyping NFTs and whatever other random fad strikes them as interesting doesn't seem to be the way to accomplish that.
My actual guess is that they got way too big, both in terms of headcount and fund size, to limit their investments to what is expected to be the best of the best in terms of financial return and societal impact.
bflesch
If you read "Careless People" you'll notice that Andreesseen was prioritizing cash over morals for a long time, and his Facebook investment/involvement was also producing highly unethical things
drcongo
Really?! They've always made a little bit of sick come up for me. Marc Andreessen has always been a grotesque parody of Lex Luthor.
bossyTeacher
How long until the company gets sued by X/Meta/Tik Tok?
kotaKat
… Interesting that the title was changed from “Hack Reveals the a16z-Backed Phone Farm Flooding TikTok With AI Influencers”.
Guess they wanted to hide the a16z connection on frontpage, huh?
Noaidi
My god, horrific. Does not everyone know everything online is a psyop now? I will tel you, they don't. No one studies things, no one takes the time. AI, social media, it all has to be protested, boycotted.
Now it seems war is coming from the US it could not be more true that at this moment.
hhh
No, we should not stop something that is inevitable. We should work with it to find ways that it fits into a productive society, such as anonymously verifying that you are a citizen so the cost of abuse is at least a felony.
Noaidi
Nothing makes this inevitable. People like you who want to do nothing about it makes it inevitable.
Hizonner
How about a few prison terms for conspiracy to defraud? And not for small fry like the "CEO" of this company either. Why not, say, 10 years for Marc Andreesen, personally? And, no, no "disrupting" it with serve-your-time-as-a-service, either.
qingcharles
I hate that Marc Andreesen' arc went from Mosaic to supervillain.
It's easier to count billionaires who aren't supervillains.
p.s. this is not a great photo of Marc on his Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Marc_Andreessen-9_(croppe...
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https://archive.ph/20uwc