‘’A phone farm is a collection of multiple smartphones used simultaneously to generate income through various apps and services, such as watching ads, completing surveys, or mining cryptocurrency.’’
Back in October, word started making the rounds of an AI startup called Doublespeed. Backed by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, Doublespeed offers customers a unique service: access to a massive phone farm that could be used to operate hundreds of AI-generated social media accounts.
Now, 404 Media reports in an explosive scoop that Doublespeed has been hacked. This wasn’t just one account associated with the startup, but the entire backend used to manage its phone farm — so it provides an extraordinary glimpse at how the service is actually being used to manipulate social media at scale.
Speaking to 404 on condition of anonymity, the hacker said they can “see the phones in use, which manager [computers controlling the phones] they had, which TikTok accounts they were assigned, proxies in use (and their passwords), and pending tasks. As well as the link to control devices for each manager.”
The hacker also shared a list of over 400 TikTok accounts operated by Doublespeed’s phone farm, about half of which were actively promoting products. Most of them, the publication reports, did so without disclosing that the posts were ads a direct violation of TikTok’s terms of use, not to mention the Federal Trade Commission’s digital advertising regulations.
While undisclosed ads might seem like small potatoes in the grand scheme of things, the speak to a bleak trend. Not only is Doublespeed a possible breeding ground for disinformation campaigns or financial scams, but they seem to be getting away with their phone farm operation without any pushback from TikTok.
Doublespeed’s TikTok accounts ran a gamut of different cons, promoting language learning apps, supplements, massage products, dating apps and more. One account, operating under the unambiguously human-sounding name of Chloe Davis, had uploaded some 200 posts featuring an AI-generated woman hawking a massage roller for a company called Vibit, 404 reported.
Though the hacker says he reported the vulnerability to Doublespeed on October 31, he notes that he still had access to the company’s back end as recently as today.
So far, Doublespeed is only active on TikTok, though it has plans to expand to Instagram, Reddit, and X-formerly-Twitter. When it does, it seems all bets are off with social media engagement, and all the influence it entails, being relegated to the highest bidder.