Paid actors, AI writing: How a new kind of video business cashed in on America’s divided politics

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The Scoop “William,” a middle-aged man in a blue short-sleeved button-down shirt whose YouTube videos have more than 14 million views, looked straight into the camera at his kitchen table in August and read a script about New York City’s mayor. His video, Mayor Mamdani Panics as Taylor Swift Triggers a $2.3 Billion Celebrity Exodus, quickly racked up more than 474,000 views. “Omar,” a shaggy, bearded creator who claimed to be based in New York, read a report to viewers in June about Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her ex. AOC FREAKS OUT as Riley Roberts CAUGHT Running Her ENTIRE Operation, set to ominous music, got more than 250,000 views. The same music played on a video, Socialist Seattle Mayor CRIES As A Beloved Bookstore Closes, from a channel called Julian News Report. It also registered a quarter of a million views. To the casual YouTube viewer, these would look like unconnected videos from political news creators outraged by events happening in cities led by Democrats. The reality is more complicated. “William” and “Omar” are actors, Semafor found in a forensic accounting of their channels’ origins. They were reading formulaic, repetitive scripts that appeared to be generated or aided by large-language models. Over the last several months, a new generation of YouTube growth-hackers have flooded American politics with sensationalized, low-quality content, reaching millions of viewers with nearly identical videos taking aim at progressive politicians including Zohran Mamdani, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker. Notably, while the videos are presented as laypeople giving straight-to-camera ideological news recaps, they feature actors and spokespeople paid small amounts of money to read nearly identical scripts laced with misleading claims and outright falsehoods. Viewers either didn’t notice or didn’t mind: A single network of interconnected videos that are affiliated with a growth-hacking company whose founder promises to be the “strongest alternative to paid ads” garnered well over 45 million views and 90,000 comments on YouTube as well as millions more impressions across social platforms like TikTok. With that level of viral videos, a small media organization can make tens or even hundreds of thousands a month. The algorithm’s appetite for news content and a growing audience of cord-cutters and older online users is fueling the rise of a new kind of clickbait built around sensationalized political stories. Turbocharged by AI, these “ghost creator” accounts appear to be run not by political operatives trying to win, or foreign intelligence efforts seeking to destabilize the US, but by engagement junkies detached from the stakes of politics. They closely monitor online trends and stories, churning out topical videos, hoping to ride YouTube’s algorithmic wave to virality and a cut of advertising revenue. Not everyone, of course, is happy about these tactics, particularly the high-profile subjects of their coverage. Staffers for major political figures have puzzled over the content, and are growing concerned about the rise of a new wave of videos with errors, exaggerations, misleading comments, and a tone that can be downright weird. “Right now, algorithms are rewarding lies and bad actors are taking advantage — particularly those who want to see a divided America,” Brandon Richards, a spokesperson for Newsom, told Semafor earlier this month. While Richards said that major tech platforms like YouTube “have been a helpful and willing partner in this fight,” he argued that “the combination of bots and increased access to powerful AI, coming at a time with the doomscroll nature of our content consumption habits, has made it easier than ever to push rage-bait and false narratives that are believed on sight.” “Unless there is a significant systemic change from all platforms, this issue will continue and is likely going to get worse,” Richards said. In this article: Step Back In 2022, Caleb Chan was a student at the University of Chicago studying politics and economics. On the side, he was building a financial news and stock-picking YouTube channel called Casgains Academy. Chan was interested in how he could use his new YouTube following to launch a crowdsourced platform for investors; in a presentation that year, he laid out how his channels could funnel users towards a platform for sharing stock tips and financial advice. It was the ambitious startup dream of a college student. Reality seemed to prove a bit more challenging. The financial platform, the Casgains Terminal, never appeared to take off; few online traces of it remain beyond an abandoned Patreon. But by 2025, when Chan graduated, he had apparently realized something: Going viral on YouTube was a business itself. Casgains Academy had more than 200,000 subscribers on YouTube and millions of views across its videos. On other, “Caleb Chan”-branded channels, Chan cultivated a smaller following with a combination of bodybuilding videos and geopolitical news (though a different man appears to play the role of Chan on Chan’s own channel.) Last year, Chan began promoting a company he said he co-founded called Virelox, a platform that promises to quickly spin up creator accounts and go viral on behalf of clients. It seemed to work almost immediately. In April, Chan posted on X that he had more than 106 YouTube accounts up and running, with the goal of launching 300 by May. On LinkedIn and X, he boasted of success on the platform, sharing pictures of himself posing with YouTube awards that the company sends creators that pass certain subscription benchmarks. In a post last August, he said his company released “2,500 organic videos every week for businesses, achieving billions of views every month.” The YouTuber credited his success to a new influencer model: “ghost creators.” Here’s how it worked, according to Chan’s posts: A client would hire Virelox to make a series of channels using popular formats on YouTube and TikTok. Virelox would then pay “ghost creators,” or paid spokespeople, to read scripted videos. In a post on X, Caleb said he used “AI + systems, heavy emphasis on the AI part,” to create two channels a day on average. Chan took credit for some of the success of Cluely, a controversial AI startup whose app assists users in situations like job interviews in real time. He claimed that Virelox’s network of ghost creators had publicized the app and garnered millions of views and impressions for little money, beating traditional advertising. “My network of over 500 ghost creators generates billions of views every month. We’ve gotten apps to #1 on the app store and added up to $2M ARR. People like Cluely pay us up to 95% lower CPMs than traditional social media paid ads. The game has changed. Organic views > paid ads,” he wrote on X in August. Chan was undeterred by YouTube policies discouraging people from spamming the platform with quick-turn content. “We’re diversified, no single issue will knock the tower down,” he posted on X. “I lost 95% of my channels in January.” He also shared some of his findings about YouTube’s algorithms on X. “okay interesting discovery: if 26 accounts post the same # within 10 minutes, the algorithm thinks it’s ‘breaking news’ pushes everything to trending,” he wrote. “tested this 9 times with my ghost creators and I’m going VIRAL because of it manufacturing news > reporting news.” In recent months, though, Chan began to find success with a particular kind of content: political news, with a bent skeptical of progressive politicians. Know More In early August, Semafor published a story about a flood of AI-generated or -assisted political content that spread false claims on YouTube. We uncovered a series of videos featuring AI narration, scripting, and some AI avatars spreading false claims — for example, that Kroger has shut down a California distribution center, that Costco and Shell are closing their stores and gas stations, or that GM and Ford plants in California are shuttering (neither company has had factories in the state in decades). After the story was published, YouTube removed several channels for content violations. The story caught the eye of two researchers at Riddance AI. The company, founded by Jeremy Carrasco and Mason Broxham to track AI-made content at scale, had been following and pointing out the explosion of fully AI-generated news content on YouTube. They had become intrigued by one unexplained trend they’d noticed in recent months. While most of the AI-enhanced videos they tracked across the internet featured AI avatars reading AI-generated scripts, a new batch of videos with AI-aided scripts and repetitive elements appeared to feature real people in place of AI avatars. They noted an element that Semafor’s initial story had missed: While we had focused on the obvious AI hallmarks, including AI-generated avatars and scripts, Riddance had discovered a network of around a dozen channels on YouTube related to Semafor’s initial reporting that appeared to be using AI-generated or enhanced scripts, matching music, and similar websites, but had been pairing them with real actors, in an effort to escape YouTube’s AI labels. The network, Riddance said, had been gaining traction. In the months since the company began tracking the videos in the spring, it had racked up 45 million views and more than 90,000 comments. Riddance grouped one set of accounts together because they all seemed to publish nearly identical videos following the same formula every few days. They each featured a person performing a straight-to-camera monologue recapping current events — and overwhelmingly focused on negative stories about prominent Democratic mayors, governors, and members of Congress. Most videos across the network were titled with the name of a Democratic politician, followed by an all-caps verb highlighting a negative economic story, a recent scandal, or alleged corruption. While the majority of claims made in the network’s videos focused on real events or reporting, they often featured wildly exaggerated or outright false titles that seemed designed to lure in viewers. A William Reports News video titled Mamdani Panics as Hilton Purposely Shuts Down $800 Million Worth of New York Hotels contained no claims that the New York mayor was panicking. The video actually made the opposite claim. (The video’s descriptions were “100%” AI-generated, according to a scan from Pangram.) A video from Julian News Report was titled Mamdani HUMILIATED As Hochul REFUSES To Approve His Ken Griffin Tax — though New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has backed his proposal, known as the pied-à-terre tax. Another account, called Victoria Foster, posted a video saying that Griffin’s firm, Citadel, had told staff to “Go to Miami or Leave,” a claim the company never made. Most of these videos begin the exact same way: with a vague anecdote about a Democratic politician, followed by a specific date. Multiple videos began with a description of the birth of the political figure they were discussing (the births of Kamala Harris, AOC, and New York grocery magnate John Catsimatidis are recurring features of videos from the Victoria Foster and William Reports News channels). Ten channels, plus Chan’s geopolitics channel, also reused the same b-minor music score, which could be heard in dozens of videos. Many scripts feature the exact same phrases. Seven accounts shared videos that repeated the phrase “here’s the part that should stop you cold.” Five accounts shared videos with the assertion that something is “not a rounding error.” Five different accounts introduced videos by saying, “Hey, everyone, today we need to talk about,” and the same five ended videos with the line, “I’ll see you in the next one.” Many topics and events were recycled across the channels: Over the course of a few months, five accounts published videos featuring what they all referred to as the “most expensive home ever sold in the United States.” The “hybrid personas,” as Riddance called them, maintained a unified identity, posting in-character consistently for months — with a few exceptions. One channel, titled Felmon’s Talk Show, initially launched as a MeidasTouch-style #Resistance account focused on President Donald Trump. The account posted sensationalized videos showing a bearded host in a button-up shirt or sweater criticizing Trump. One video’s title read: Trump COLLAPSES as Doctors EXPOSE His DEMENTIA Signs While He Claims He PASSED Every TEST. Another blared: FURIOUS Supreme Court SHUTS DOWN Trump’s Lawyer as He STORMS OUT of His OWN HISTORIC HEARING. That one garnered some 129,000 views. In May, the channel stopped posting; fewer of the videos were picking up steam. But a few weeks after the account went dormant, the bearded man identified on YouTube as “Felmon” popped up on a pro-Trump channel, New York Reports, which had previously used AI narration and avatars. (The channel was taken down from YouTube after Semafor’s initial reporting, but clips remain on TikTok.) Now clad in a T-shirt and exuding a more masculine vibe, “Felmon,” who once talked about his disgust with Trump and Republicans, was churning out daily videos focused on problems plaguing Democrats like Mamdani, Newsom, and other progressives. The videos felt the same to Riddance’s Carrasco and Broxham. But who was behind the accounts? And why were they going through the effort to pump out videos attached to fake identities? Was it a political actor looking to sway people online unknowingly? As the Riddance researchers watched the videos and checked out the profiles, they found strange links between the channels beyond the content itself. William Reports News’ YouTube bio claimed he was married to the person behind Victoria Foster, and showed her avatar side-by-side with his. The William Reports Linktree hyperlinked, inexplicably, to Felmon’s Talk Show, which features the same actor who appeared in New York Reports. The channel Omar Talks Canada currently occupies the domain for ZBN, a channel which also claims on its website that “Omar” and “Felmon” are its founders. An unlisted June video of “Omar” titled New York IN SHOCK As Dallas Mayor Predicts ‘Avalanche’ Of Banks LEAVING Wall Street! appeared in the feed for Julian News Report, a channel that claimed to be from an “independent news reporter” based in Canada; another Omar video appeared in the Julian feed in August, without explanation. In one May video caption, the host of Julian Reports also referred to himself as “Omar.” Several accounts actually swapped personalities. Freya Reports News rebranded as Victoria Foster, while a new persona began occupying the Freya Reports account. Riddance also found evidence suggesting the individuals reading these scripts were paid spokespeople. The researchers found that “Omar,” one of the personas behind the channels Omar Reacts and Omar Reacts Canada, was actually a video content creator named Kareem M. Maize, whose Fiverr spokesperson-for-hire page lists hundreds of positive reviews, as well as an offer to perform promotional work in an Australian accent. (Maize had also created a video about Cluely on a different YouTube channel where he talks about technology). Another account, William Reports News, depicts the actor Frank George, whose YouTube channel shows commercials he’s made for joint massage cream, a professional meat thermometer, and an ear-cleaning device. In a phone call earlier this month, Maize acknowledged that he told “white lies” about where he was based, telling Semafor he is in Pennsylvania, not New York or Canada, as his channels stated. Although he said he did not want to use his real name in the videos, he took ownership of the channels in which they appeared, saying they expressed his political viewpoints (he told Semafor he is a “a libertarian socialist”). He said he used AI on some videos, but outsourced the editing and other tasks to “people in the Philippines.” But when Semafor attempted several times to reach him again with more detailed questions about the inexplicable links between his page and other channels, like those run by “Felmon” and “Julian,” he did not respond. In a message to Semafor, George confirmed that he was being paid to make the videos, though he said he did not know who was paying him, just that he went through a broker. He described the videos as advertisements. Still, he noted, he thought the content was compelling enough to take the job. “They r paid ads. I am a spokesperson,” he wrote through Fiverr’s messaging service. “I find the content ...interesting. Uncovering scams.” When asked who the broker was, he replied: “Casgains.” In recent months, Chan’s companies, Virelox and Casgains, posted ads for acting work fronting YouTube videos primarily focused on political news. A Backstage casting call Virelox posted in July called for “a reliable and professional on-camera spokesperson for a news-related YouTube channel. This is a long-term opportunity with consistent, high-volume work. You will deliver news-style content on camera, speaking clearly and confidently while maintaining an engaging, professional presence. Turnaround time must be comfortably within 24 hours per video. Access to a high-quality camera, microphone, proper lighting, and the ability to do minimal editing (clean cuts) is required.” Another recent posting sought out “long-term African American male hosts to record news commentary scripts,” offering to pay $26 per video. While digging into the network, Semafor found a Casgains-branded internal video tracking dashboard (which can be found with a simple Google search) that monitors an ecosystem of YouTube channels, including William Reports News, Julian News Report, Omar Reacts, Victoria Foster, Julian Talks Canada, and Omar Talks Canada, as well as another channel, called Jordan Talks. The channels were labeled “anti-Dem.” Chan said in an emailed statement to Semafor: “Virelox Media is an independent digital media publisher. Following my studies in economics and politics at the University of Chicago, I founded the company to produce in-depth commentary, news explainers, and current affairs analysis. “We do not produce content on behalf of political campaigns, PACs, ideological organizations, or paid clients, nor do we accept paid political sponsorships. We do not use deepfake avatars, AI-generated synthetic news anchors, or automated spam bots on any of our channels. We have a team of over 50 scriptwriters, editors, researchers, and news hosts and all of our videos are managed by our team members. Regarding New York Reports: Virelox Media has zero affiliation with that channel, nor do we know who was behind it. Virelox operates as an independent media company.” Chan did not respond to an additional detailed list of questions. The day after Semafor reached out to Chan, the company first removed a link to one of Chan’s channels from its website. Several days later, the company took down its website entirely. (As of Thursday, a LinkedIn page for the company still exists.) An email to the same email address on Tuesday bounced. Max’s view When I first reported on the error-riddled AI-generated news reports on YouTube, I spoke with researchers and some political operatives about the videos’ impact and what type of individual or organization might be behind them. People close to Newsom privately speculated that the culprit might be a foreign power looking to undermine the California governor’s seemingly inevitable 2028 presidential campaign. When we first connected earlier this summer, Riddance’s team suspected that it might be a political entity looking to steer the conversation along the margins. The truth, at least about one network of accounts, appears to be both more familiar and stranger. Chan was looking for an edge on YouTube and attempting to make money by garnering the biggest audience possible. He clearly saw that anti-Democrat content was resonating, and programmed his channels to millions of viewers interested in that type of content. The lo-fi nature of the videos, their formulaic content, and their inaccuracies don’t seem to have turned off viewers. Real people have been watching. Riddance told Semafor that commenters regularly interacted with similar channels, and were likely largely real YouTube users. “Either these hybrid personas have genuinely captured tens of thousands of politically engaged viewers on YouTube, or they have an extremely sophisticated inauthentic commenter network that we were unable to detect,” Broxham told Semafor. To give a sense of who they are: The analytics for the Victoria Foster page on the internal video tracking dashboard showed that the audience for Foster’s videos is overwhelmingly American (85%), male (80%), and older (80% over the age of 55, and most over 65). Stats for Omar Reacts, Julian Reports, and William Reports News mirrored those demographics almost exactly. Following the analytics in this way isn’t all that different from what many media organizations do; understanding the audience is perhaps the most fundamental aspect of longevity in media. What’s new is the apparent scale and ease provided by a combination of AI tools, freelance platforms, and cheap digital production. In this case, a small organization was able to generate more engagement than the YouTube channels for major media organizations like The Washington Post, The New Yorker, The Boston Globe, and, sadly, Semafor. As the midterm elections approach in the US, the story of one twenty-something with a passion for growth-hacking offers a tiny glimpse of what may be to come as campaigns and super PACs with access to floods of money and data professionalize those tools. Notable - The tactics and scale are new, but the 2016 campaign featured a different, notorious set of entrepreneurs selling political division.