“Crying girls will make you rich”: How marketers trick users with mass-produced "organic" content

Last July, a dating safety app for women called Tea suffered a data breach that leaked tens of thousands of images, including selfies, photo IDs, and images shared in posts and other content. The hack hurt user trust, caused Tea to be removed from Apple’s App Store, and stunted its growth. 

Now Tea is trying to mount a comeback thanks to a refreshed website and Android app — and hundreds of TikTok videos of women describing how Tea helped them catch a cheater or avoid a guy with a criminal record. The videos are emotional, gossipy, and compelling. They’ve earned tens of millions of views. But they don’t disclose that they’re paid ads.

One video shows a woman lying in bed and shaking her head. The camera pans to a man who appears to be doing chores in the kitchen.

“This was my perfect husband. He brought me breakfast in bed. Cooked soup when I was sick,” reads text on the screen. “Took me around the world and gave me diamonds. And today I found out he’s had a mistress for 3 years.”

The video, posted on Feb. 3 by the account @single.salta, includes the caption, “I thought I knew everything about my marriage. Tea showed me the truth.”

The account had generated more than 60 million views as of last week across close to 300 videos. They typically feature the same woman describing how Tea helped her expose her husband/fiance/boyfriend's infidelity. In posts spanning roughly 8 months, she has repeatedly declared she's leaving him "tomorrow"—a departure that never seems to arrive.

Indicator identified the woman in the videos as a professional social media creator based in Miami. Her online portfolio features sample videos of her and the same man and children shown on the TikTok account. They appear to still be together, though she did not respond to emails or text messages.

Her account is one of at least a dozen whose sole purpose is to promote Tea. The accounts reviewed by Indicator did not use TikTok’s “Paid promotion” label, nor do the videos disclose that they're part of a paid campaign, both of which are required by TikTok’s Branded Content Policy. The Federal Trade Commission’s rules for social media endorsements require influencers to disclose a paid relationship within the content, as opposed to in the bio or a hashtag, and to accurately represent how they use a product. Tea did not respond to requests for comment.

The Tea campaign is emblematic of a fast-growing and frequently deceptive trend in social media marketing: industrialized UGC, or user-generated content. Apps and other services recruit a handful to dozens of creators, have them create new accounts, and pay them to post hundreds or thousands of videos and slideshows in order to brute-force the TikTok algorithm and fill the For You pages of unsuspecting users.

Industrial UGC campaigns blur the line between ads and organic content beyond recognition. Posts and comments are engineered to appear as genuine, often emotionally-driven moments, or like a friend or peer letting you in on a secret or productivity hack. As one UGC marketer explained in a recent webinar, the content "should feel organic, should feel authentic ... and to normal TikTok users, they can't really tell the difference."

"Organic" in this context doesn't mean unpaid or genuine; it means optimized to appear that way. Users scroll through feeds filled with manufactured drama and self-interested advice, unable to distinguish between genuine recommendations and paid promotions. They make decisions—downloading apps, trusting services, sharing personal information—based on what they believe are authentic peer experiences. Behind it all is an industrial operation that has figured out how to make advertising invisible by making it look authentic.

Indicator analyzed more than half a dozen large-scale UGC campaigns that collectively earned more than 2 billion views, primarily on TikTok, over the past roughly 12 months. The review identified rampant violations of TikTok’s Branded Content policy, as well as apparent violations of the FTC’s rules for social media endorsements.

Indicator shared more than 60 accounts associated with the campaigns with TikTok and the Federal Trade Commission.

"TikTok's Community Guidelines require content to be labeled as commercial when a creator is promoting a brand or its products or services in exchange for payment,” said Mahsau Cullinane, a TikTok spokesperson in an emailed statement. “We’re reviewing and enforcing content that violates our policies."

Cullinane said that the company may block content from the For You feed or ban an account if it fails to adhere to the guidelines. She said TikTok may also apply the "Paid promotion” label to a piece of content if a creator fails to do so.

After Indicator contacted TikTok and the companies behind UGC campaigns, most or all content was removed from multiple accounts associated with campaigns. It’s unclear whether this was done by TikTok or by the companies or creators themselves.

The FTC did not respond to a request for comment.

This Indicator intelligence report draws on interviews with creators, UGC marketers, an advertising and ecommerce lawyer, as well as a review of hundreds of creator posts, to provide a detailed overview of how industrial UGC campaigns are run, how to spot accounts, and why platforms and the FTC appear to be taking a hands-off approach. It also reveals how AI tools and an emerging approach that pays people overseas to generate facial reactions and videos for use in UGC posts could enable such campaigns to scale further at lower cost.