5/31/2026 at 4:59:10 AM
Doesn’t this article’s focus on race come off as a bit weird to anyone else?Pretty sure the people running these businesses are targeting a wide variety of different demographics. The article fails to provide any context as to why pretending to be a black influencer is special.
by joxdosba
5/31/2026 at 5:07:30 AM
From the article.> While we also found Native American, Hispanic, and white women characters, the most viewed and engaged-with AI-generated characters found by The Verge are Black women.
by Paradigm2020
5/31/2026 at 6:22:25 AM
With zero explanation as to how they collected that data, they might just be basing that on whatever the algorithm knows the author to be interested in.Over here in Europe I see exactly zero of these ads with black people in them, but I see a plenty of these ads.
by joxdosba
5/31/2026 at 9:26:46 AM
Due to ad transparency you can access ad libraries of brands advertising on several platforms, and depending on the platform and country you can also see some targeting details.I'm not 100% sure but I think ad transparency was enforced in Europe after the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
by libertine
5/31/2026 at 12:12:39 PM
I really want to make a joke about representation, but more to the point.Having different ethnic people targets different demographics. We hear about people from various groups wanting this and now someone is doing it.
They seem to be getting traction by doing this. If it works for them others will follow.
by oldnetguy
5/31/2026 at 5:57:43 AM
I suspect it's because the people who write for The Verge are themselves non-black progressives who think it's morally important to engage with black businesses in a way they see as anti-racist. So scammers deliberately creating fake black people to make emotional, anti-racist appeals to buy scam products particularly offends or seems relevant to the specific individuals at The Verge who pitched, wrote, edited, and approved this article.According to the byline, the author of this article is a person named Nicole Froio. According to her personal website: https://nicolefroio.com/about-nicole/ and MuckRack page https://muckrack.com/nicole-froio/articles , she is a Colombian-Brazilian journalist who describes herself as an "anarcho-feminist", has multiple academic degrees in humanities fields with some kind of intersectional feminist bent, and has written for various progressive publications in her career.
In other words, she is exactly the kind of person I would expect to find it personally morally and politically important to buy products from actual black creators, and so to find scams about black creators being personally meaningful, and worth specifically writing about.
by JuniperMesos
5/31/2026 at 2:03:46 PM
Yeah I'm very confused by the original commenter's claimed ignorance. We went through this bleating at full tilt during and after covid and it being forced onto everyone at all times where "if you don't like it you're affirmatively racist" was one of the reasons voters went back to Trump. Why is it so incredibly hard for Americans to have a memory, or cognition of any sort?!by halJordan
5/31/2026 at 5:22:19 PM
I’m European :)by joxdosba
5/31/2026 at 3:18:22 PM
Creating fake white women is seen as less of a crimeby xyzsparetimexyz