Bots used to be crude. Now manufactured attention is a product — and Medvi's network of 800+ fake Facebook doctors shows what happens when engineered visibility hits a regulated industry.
Internal documents show Clearstone Analytics packaged 'wellness visit' location data and sold it to insurers and marketers without meaningful consent.
Marketers used to buy ads. Now they buy conversations. Inside the growth operation turning obscure brands into things people can't stop talking about.
Moderators of woodworking, aquarium, and ham radio communities describe a losing war against generated posts designed to farm ad revenue.
Everlume trained 'memorial companions' on scraped obituaries and funeral home guestbooks — without asking the families.
Dasherly's 'earnings sensitivity' experiments quietly showed veteran couriers lower offers to find the floor of what they'd accept.
ParkSwift stored plate numbers, payment tokens, and GPS history in an open database. The researcher who reported it got merch and a legal threat.
Six months of internal chat logs from the Vantablack ransomware group reveal salaried negotiators, performance reviews, and customer satisfaction surveys.
Everyone worried about bots and fake news. The real force shaping what billions of people see online is attention—and it has quietly become an industry.
Frostline pushed a firmware update that paywalled features owners already paid for. Then the jailbreaks started.
Most people think viral content happens by accident. Behind many of the internet's biggest hits is an invisible industry built to make you pay attention.
Records from three districts show GuardClass's AI flagged literature homework, LGBTQ support searches, and a chemistry study guide as threats.
The best product doesn't always win—the most visible one does. Why distribution, not quality, increasingly decides which companies break out.
