a16z-Backed Startup Sells Thousands of ‘Synthetic Influencers’ to Manipulate

Doublespeed, a startup backed by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), is pitching an AI-powered service that lets clients orchestrate actions on thousands of social media accounts, a practice that violates the policies of all major platforms. According to the company's site, its deployment layer mimics natural user interaction on physical devices so that content appears human to algorithms. Doublespeed did not respond to a request for comment, but the service appears designed to evade platform detection, using AI to generate accounts and posts with a human doing 5 percent of "touch up" work at the end.