There you have it! A Chinese-linked shopping app spent up to $962 million on Meta ads built aroun…
August 31, 2026 · 0 likes · 0 comments
China Threat Workforce
There you have it! A Chinese-linked shopping app spent up to $962 million on Meta ads built around influencers who don't exist.
Not exaggerated people. Manufactured ones — AI-generated faces selling you junk from a phone.
We covered it on UnbiasedHeadlines.com: https://lnkd.in/ergSa7g3
The numbers are the whole story.
A Czech nonprofit, Online Risk Labs, studied the top 100 creators Temu boosted across the UK and 27 EU countries over 16 months. 73 of the 100 are likely fake.
The top "creator," an AI-generated persona called Ya Lily, ran in roughly 109,541 Temu ad campaigns — about 225 a day — and was viewed more than one billion times. Her bio lists a city that doesn't exist and an email that traces back to China.
An AI face pulling a billion views, and not one real human behind it.
Now hold that against the rulebook. EU law flatly bans this kind of fake-endorsement advertising. And as of today, not one regulator in Brussels or London has opened a single inquiry.
That gap is the entire thesis of my book, REPLACEMENT. A China-linked company runs a nine-figure AI influence operation straight through Western platforms, breaks our own advertising laws at industrial scale, and the West does nothing but ask for comment nobody answers.
We keep writing rules we won't enforce, while they keep exploiting the ones we do.
Meta, by the way, makes almost 2% of its entire European ad revenue from this one advertiser. So who exactly is motivated to shut it down?
REPLACEMENT — out now on Amazon. This chapter wrote itself. Did you read it? https://a.co/d/03VJhu37
Who's protecting you when the influencer isn't even a person?
Not exaggerated people. Manufactured ones — AI-generated faces selling you junk from a phone.
We covered it on UnbiasedHeadlines.com: https://lnkd.in/ergSa7g3
The numbers are the whole story.
A Czech nonprofit, Online Risk Labs, studied the top 100 creators Temu boosted across the UK and 27 EU countries over 16 months. 73 of the 100 are likely fake.
The top "creator," an AI-generated persona called Ya Lily, ran in roughly 109,541 Temu ad campaigns — about 225 a day — and was viewed more than one billion times. Her bio lists a city that doesn't exist and an email that traces back to China.
An AI face pulling a billion views, and not one real human behind it.
Now hold that against the rulebook. EU law flatly bans this kind of fake-endorsement advertising. And as of today, not one regulator in Brussels or London has opened a single inquiry.
That gap is the entire thesis of my book, REPLACEMENT. A China-linked company runs a nine-figure AI influence operation straight through Western platforms, breaks our own advertising laws at industrial scale, and the West does nothing but ask for comment nobody answers.
We keep writing rules we won't enforce, while they keep exploiting the ones we do.
Meta, by the way, makes almost 2% of its entire European ad revenue from this one advertiser. So who exactly is motivated to shut it down?
REPLACEMENT — out now on Amazon. This chapter wrote itself. Did you read it? https://a.co/d/03VJhu37
Who's protecting you when the influencer isn't even a person?