The Epitome of Profundity

The other night, I was trying to search for reviews of an obscure TV show (You Me Her) starring Amy Poehler’s brother Greg, whose previous show—Welcome to Sweden—I found charming. Apparently, it turns out you can air a TV show in 2016 and have basically zero reviews. So naturally, I turned to Twitter for something close to review—and I was quite surprised to find a lot of tweets about the show in my Twitter search. It’s a TV show airing exclusively on DirectTV’s Audience Channel with zero name actors, so that kind of raised an eyebrow.

What also caught my eye: a Jon Stewart parody account, a Mike Tyson parody account, a Hangover parody account, and a Donald Trump parody account all tweeted about the show. All of the aforementioned accounts also interestingly had tweets about the Fox reality TV show American Grit with John Cena. I figured it was some sort of racket with parody accounts advertising TV shows. 

But that isn’t the whole story—the first five non-parody accounts I saw all had tweets about You Me Her, American Grit and a National Geographic show called Port Protection. These accounts all had rather dissimilar bios (retired SFPD officer, marketing manager, girl in high school, and a mom). The supposed retired SFPD officer and supposed marketing manager retweeted two unexpected accounts—GirlsLibrary ("Life hacks for women", 300k+ followers) and Truth & Style (”World's best fashion & inspiration”, 1.48M followers*); the retweeted tweets pertained to Port Protection, a show seemingly incongruous with the brand of either account. (Oh, and the marketing manager’s avatar is a stock photo.)

As it turns out, GirlsLibrary is a brand of a Los Angeles company called Phantom Firm. On its about page, Phantom Firm says the company “specializes in engineering & seeding subversive digital propaganda on behalf of Brands, Political campaigns, TV shows, Films & Celebrities,” a rather unusual description. Phantom Firm’s clients apparently include the likes of Nike, Trident, Fox, HBO, DirectTV, among others. In the footer, the company promises "100% Confidentiality guaranteed" and says "White Label service [is] available for agencies of all types."

Phantom Firm is the brainchild of Darwyn Metzger. Metgzer was one of the subjects of a 2014 Seattle Weekly cover story by reporter Matt Driscoll about Twitter parody account operators. Metzger told Driscoll that he operated “over roughly 300 parody or character Twitter accounts.” According to the piece, Metzger employed(?) “20 freelance writers [from] across the country [who were mostly] comedians and former journalists” to come up with tweets for various accounts that he conceived, and the accounts were mostly monetizing click referrals (something that’s no longer the case).

After reading this, I went back to Twitter to search again for You Me Her and Port Protection’s hashtags, and my analysis revealed that 67 accounts tweeted under the hashtags for both shows. A number of the fictional tweeters urged people who tweeted some keyword vaguely related to either show to tune in, and these fictional tweeters compromised the overwhelming majority of the tweets using the hashtags.

With Nielsen now measuring social media reach of TV shows, I can’t help but wonder if all these fake tweets (and retweets) are some attempt to increase the social ratings of these TV shows. The several hundred tweets for each TV show pale in comparison to the tens or hundreds of thousands of people discussing top programs, but perhaps they can leave some footprint. Another theory is that the accounts are some gambit by Phantom to prove the merit of their social media solutions, or Phantom is just trying to get a hashtag to trend. What I do know, however, is this: television networks are paying people to have D-tier parody accounts (and nonexistent persons) tweet about their D-tier shows.