By Nitish Pahwa

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June 27, 20265:50 AM

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In recent weeks, social media users have beheld a steady stream of seemingly organic viral moments throughout their feeds: a Knicks fan’s religiously pluralistic chant outside Madison Square Garden, “candid” TikTok interviews with former California gubernatorial candidate Tom Steyer, posts from conservative influencers who share Polymarket charts and cast doubt on L.A.’s mayoral primary results, and bizarre social media exchanges between DoorDash and T-Pain.

At first glance, such posts seem like run-of-the-mill viral content. But they have something else in common: They are all paid sponsorships, either undisclosed as such or, at best, barely labeled in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it manner. Look again at that Knicks video, and you’ll see the Kalshi logo on the fan’s microphone and the dancing robot’s jersey.

The practice of undisclosed monetary partnerships, as corporate sponsorships or political campaign ops, has been a scourge upon digital commons ever since the rise of the influencer. Yet regulators under the Biden administration were at least willing to strengthen its influencer guidelines and go after celebrities for their sketchy crypto endorsements, like Kim Kardashian’s megaviral currency promotions on Instagram. With the Trump administration and Republican Party broadly eschewing oversight of white-collar misdeeds—and even establishing their own influencer relationships—there will hardly be any accountability or law enforcement to make these quid pro quo endorsements more transparent, as is ostensibly required by existing law. At a time when diligent journalism has been smothered, users trust anything that flashes on their screens and feeds, and side hustles dominate a significant portion of the economy, the persistent haziness of what’s “real” and what’s been paid for by some company, politician, or public figure is likely to grow increasingly more opaque, shredding the last remnants of our already-tattered sense of a shared reality.

On X, seemingly objective writers, politicians, and influencers freely laud prediction-market charts without noting they were granted hundreds or thousands of dollars to do so. Far-right influencers are compensated for amplifying messages coordinated top down by the MAGA political apparatus—and they don’t legally have to say so, per Federal Trade Commission regulations, since what they’re selling is not a tangible, solid product. Steyer’s campaign paid for a walk-and-talk with an Angeleno content creator whose sole disclosure to that effect was a hashtag mentioning the marketing company (Flighthouse Media) through which the money was routed. Aggregation account Pop Crave’s habit of taking money from cultural figures to promote certain news and events (frequently without any acknowledgment of said transactions) has been more widely exposed in recent years. And T-Pain admitted he’s actually a #DoorDashPartner only after users began to smell something fishy.

It was already revealing enough, earlier this year, when the broader internet came to understand the pernicious and widespread art of viral clipping (i.e., enlisting armies of video editors and sock-puppet accounts to push engineered clips of certain creators and artists into the broader discourse). It’s also likely that the true extent and reach of these secret sponsorships still eludes us.

Last year, crypto investigator ZachXBT posted a list of more than 160 influencers in the sector who had taken money to promote a particular token; fewer than five of the influencers publicly noted that those posts were #ads. A 2025 study from three London-based researchers surveyed a sample of 100 million tweets about various companies that were posted from 2014–21; they found that up to 96 percent of posts that were very likely sponsored were never disclosed as such. (Some LinkedIn influencers have mused that the lack of clarity around #partnership posts stems from a desire to maximize algorithmic reach—just in case their social network of choice decides to redirect specific ads away from users who’ve made clear they don’t wish to see them.) Again, thanks to lack of enforcement, it’s possible we’ll never know how many ads we’ve been exposed to throughout all our years on social media.

There is, however, one promising trend: Consumers who are sick of this paid spamming are taking it to court. Last year, the law firm Morgan Lewis noted a significant uptick in class-action suits against corporations and influencers over undisclosed partnerships, as American consumers alleged that big-name brands like Celsius and Shein were promulgating this stuff. Such litigation has continued this year, relying on state laws and extant FTC guidelines to hit back at companies like Spotify and Gymshark. The Better Business Bureau also recently announced that it’s referring Kalshi to state attorneys general over its obscure marketing tactics. These cases will be tricky to argue; funding trails can be hidden by dark-money orgs that appear on financial disclosure but employ vague names and aren’t mandated to share any mission statements or specific actions. The murky nature of these posts also makes it harder to reach clarity. Sometimes, someone on YouTube just really likes a given product and doesn’t get paid to gush about it (even though they would cash an upfront check if asked). But the point of such suits seems to be less to pick on each company/influencer one by one and more to make undisclosed partnerships a business risk and potential liability writ large.

In the meantime, however, we’re going to see plenty more creative methods of getting around the need for hashtags. Extant federal loopholes that let digital celebs get away with covertly selling an overall brand or message instead of a real product (e.g., a crypto token, a GLP-1, a body-morphing procedure) won’t be closed anytime soon, since this administration and its allies benefit from that ambiguity. And these furtive ads are so prevalent that mere diligence in scrolling or brush-ups on digital literacy aren’t sufficient solutions. Until the entire digital economy gets a severe overhaul, it’s safest to assume that modern-day social media is just a wholesale ad network that’s left your ad blocker in the dust.