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Creators Archive

Archives for December 2025

Richard Lawler
Richard Lawler
MegaLag has returned a year later with part two of his video series investigating the Honey extension.

Beyond part one’s exposure of affiliate revenue hijacking, MegaLag digs into Honey’s “extortion” by adding limited-use “friends and family” type discounts and lying to the store owners about never removing codes for unaffiliated businesses while trying to sign them up as partners.

Other misdeeds described include marketing Honey’s for-adult-use-only browser extension to kids in partnership with channels like Mr Beast, who encouraged kids to install it everywhere they could, while collecting data on everyone who installed its extension, even if they never signed up. And despite a cease-and-desist from PayPal’s lawyers, this series isn’t over yet.

Richard Lawler
Richard Lawler
White House “investigating” after a YouTube livestream popped up on its website.

On Thursday night, the White House Live News section featured YouTuber @RealMattMoney, for reasons that remain unclear. According to Bloomberg, “The White House is aware of the incident and looking into the matter, a White House official said on the condition of anonymity.”

Emma Roth
Emma Roth
TikTok is “turning into a Chinese super app.”

During Semafor’s Mixed Signals podcast, Instagram head Adam Mosseri said TikTok is “very much applying lessons they’ve learned in China to the rest of the world:”

Super apps, which are very popular in China, are not popular in the same way outside of China, and I think they’re turning into a Chinese super app — and that may or may not work outside of China.

Richard Lawler
Richard Lawler
YouTube shut down two AI slop channels that pumped out fake movie trailers.

The Screen Culture and KH Studio YouTube pages have suddenly disappeared, taking their fake clips with them, reports Deadline. An earlier Deadline investigation showed how they operated, mixing official movie footage with AI-generated images, which some movie studios were profiting from by claiming the ad revenue they brought in.

YouTube spokesperson Jack Malon provided this statement to The Verge:

After their initial suspension, these channels made the necessary corrections in order to be readmitted into the YouTube Partner Program. However, once monetizing again, they reverted to clear violations of our spam and misleading metadata policies, and as a result, they have been terminated from the platform.

Nathan Edwards
Nathan Edwards
1,100 phones in a warehouse generating TikTok influencer slop.

Emanuel Maiberg at 404 Media reports that a hacker has gained access to a server farm stuffed with phones churning out AI influencer ads. It’s owned by a startup called Doublespeed, which advertises “bulk content creation” and just got a million bucks from Andreessen Horowitz. Neat.

A vague study on Nazi bots created chaos in the Taylor Swift fan universe

An analysis of social media posts following Swift’s album release found “inauthentic” activity online. The Taylor Swift media ecosystem is divided over what it means.

Mia Sato
Sen. Ed Markey wants media to fight for the First Amendment
Play

“Grow up, Mr. President. Grow up, Brendan Carr.”

Nilay Patel