Immigrants have long been the targets of misinformation and scams, and this didn’t start with social media or the rampant use of AI. As Max Siegelbaum remembers, scammers used duplicitous ads in papers and flyers to lure immigrants desperate to find a way to fix their problems with the immigration legal system. But today, with TikTok being a dominant source of information for immigrants about the journey to the United States, as well as about navigating the immigration system once they’re here, nefarious actors are exploiting this to scam immigrants out of money.
Screenshot: Documented, TikTok Lawyers Face Their AI Clones.
I spoke with Max, one of the cofounders of Documented with Mazin Sidahmed, and Sam Rabiyah, the reporter who has spent months investigating and writing about the upside-down world of social media. As Sam said, there is a lot of value in social media as a place for people to share information. But at the same time, it is also an almost entirely unregulated world where reputable attorneys are being cloned by AI bots, and people with no commitment to journalistic integrity are able to mimic the social cues of established broadcast journalism to tell sensational stories that garner views but do little to actually inform.
Screenshot: Documented, News Influencers Cash in on The “Criminal Immigrant” Narrative.
Sam pointed out that TikTok is really the first platform that is 100 percent algorithm- and content-based rather than replicating social networks like other social media platforms do. That might seem obvious to many of you, but what it means is that even the minimum amount of trust and vetting that can happen through social networks online is totally absent on TikTok, where brand new scammer accounts can go viral the same day they’re created if they are able to tap into what people actually want to see. As we discussed, this may be the latest example of what social theorists have called the “crisis of authority,” which basically means that it’s sort of harder than ever for people to tell serious journalism or research, or even a real, qualified attorney, apart from accounts that mimic those styles and behavior. On the one hand, the democratization of knowledge and expertise is, in my view, a very good thing. But there are negative externalities.
Jean Baudrillard wrote about the growing disconnection between reality and the images of reality. He emphasized that where fidelity to the original was at one point a staple of artistic production, the image was gradually masking and distorting that reality, and would eventually disconnect from reality entirely at the stage of the hyperreal. What Documented’s reporting shows is that immigrants who are looking for information online are already living in something of an immigration simulation — not a faithful reproduction of what’s true and not yet totally divorced from the underlying reality of professional attorneys and journalists who are doing real work. But that makes me wonder at what point AI scammers will move on from copying real attorneys and create an entire alternate universe of fully artificial information and legal advice, the immigration hyperreal.
Even when it’s not as nefarious as cloning someone’s likeness, the fact that reputable immigration attorneys are having their videos copied and reposted to nameless accounts means that they are not always reaping the benefits of the work that they are putting in to share information.
Screenshot: Documented, TikTok Lawyers Face Their AI Clones.
As Sam said, one effect of all this may be a return to, or a renewed romanticization of, the analog, such as in-person and over-the-phone legal consultations.
Stories like this, about the media ecosystem that immigrants themselves are living in and navigating, don’t always make it to the national news outlets. But because Documented is focused on the immigrant community specifically in New York City, they have a unique window into what immigrants care about most. I’m grateful that Max and Sam could join me to talk about the current series they are working on. I encourage you to check out the stories. I also encourage you to check out the tool that they built that allows you to do your own investigative work on TikTok, especially if you’re like me and are not really that active on that platform. Thanks to everyone who joined us for the conversation as well.