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There’s a pernicious form of viral video that’s reshaping our collective reality, and it’s not even related to artificial intelligence. These videos are very real—albeit subtly engineered to generate entire trends.
Over the past year, the cultural saturation of unorthodox figures like “looksmaxxer” Clavicular, alt-rocker Cameron Winter, stunt comedian Druski, and white nationalist Nick Fuentes has brought wider attention to the practice employed by their paid teams (and, to a lesser but still potent extent, their volunteer stans) to successfully maximize their reach: clipping, which refers to the act itself and the name of a pioneering company in the space.
The practice is straightforward: Take a long-form video, like a Twitch stream or podcast video, and cut it into a (potentially) viral clip to be shared on social media. Multiply the number of people who take these clips, and multiply the number of accounts these “clippers” have control over, and you can land a high impact with few resources—far-reaching engagement and impressions for brands and creators without relying upon traditional ad agencies. Companies that hire clippers to flood the feeds—on behalf of clients who could be individual influencers or big-name orgs such as, allegedly, Kalshi and the NFL—will often have their own “fake” pages and aggregation accounts, with followings that have built up over time, as an extra bit of vertical integration. Best part: The clippers work for cheap, and none of the promotional aspects need to be publicly disclosed, thanks to a federal-regulation loophole that relaxes transparency standards on ads that don’t sell tangible products. (No longer does a watermark automatically confer authority.)
That knowledge gap is increasingly what powers the online experience in 2026—everything you’re watching on the feeds could, potentially, be an ad programmed to make someone a Discourse Topic and/or Zeitgeist Definer, made famous thanks to paid spammers instead of organic attention. The effect is to make one wonder whether anything on social media is “real,” even if it isn’t A.I. It’s like Dead Internet Theory but with sponcon; left unchecked, it portends a digital future where a public figure can all but dictate their social media presence and visibility, seizing the Narrative without needing to deepfake any of it.
A clipper edits snippets of videos where their clients appear (livestreams, interviews, TV segments, personal uploads) and curates particular moments, a few minutes long at most, that have discourse-generating provocations (say, shooting at an alligator). They then share that work across major social media feeds (TikTok, Instagram, X, YouTube Shorts) and gin up inorganic interest: creating sock-puppet accounts that also share the clip, liking and commenting on the other accounts’ posts, tagging bigger aggregation pages that can spread its reach. The algorithms then feed you a clip of some guy—maybe accompanied by a certain song that a label paid the poster to use—and it catches your attention because it appears to have a lot of engagement, doesn’t look like A.I., and features something absolutely ridiculous, like a dude who “says he’s INFERTILE from all the looksmaxxing compounds he takes.” It’s going to leave an impression, and that’s the point. And your incidental view will count toward the total impressions that allow some enterprising young clip editor, subcontracted by a contractor for Clavicular, to make a few more dollars for introducing you and other unknowing scrollers to looksmaxxing-compound-induced infertility.
The videos are real, but the picture they shape for you is often skewed, manipulated, or plain false. The stan armies that power Nick Fuentes’ growing recognition can spread a video of him criticizing the United States’ invasion of Venezuela so as to reach and influence those who don’t know he supported that operation from jump. You also see this with Tucker Carlson’s podcast, where his anti-Trump statements and dunks on Ted Cruz break through to liberal users even though he otherwise remains as racist and antisemitic as ever. The effect of clipping is context collapse maximized to further a hasty impression of a vaguely famous person. In that environment, the most successful (and profitable) marketing is the most outrageous. Unfortunately, the people who can really leave an impact quickly are also often the most problematic.
The basic tactic itself, of promoting lengthy shows by paying others to promote edited clips, goes back to the concept of the movie trailer. This incarnation industrializes that process at hyperspeed to boost a person (or a group) for its own sake. There is no one xQc livestream that you watched and remembered and canonized, no one particular output of his; you just vaguely learned, in a 30-second impression, that a guy named xQc exists and is a streamer.
And you learned that thanks to the clippers. Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson now has his own clipping operation, Vyro, but it wasn’t long ago that he was turning to the startup known as Clipping for help with a promo campaign. Per Bloomberg, Donaldson’s people paid the company a subscription fee, and an additional $50 for every 100,000 views their clips of his show would get on all the feeds; Clipping in turn compensated its clippers up to $1,500 for every million views their videos logged. For the buyers, it’s way cheaper, more efficient, and less burdensome than the official Meta/TikTok/YouTube ad-and-influencer apparatus. For the clippers, it’s pretty sweet pay for all the work put in: a nearly scientific understanding of which scenes to clip, how and when and where to post them, and what to add to their hashtags and comments. Everything’s all approved and taken care of when it comes to rights involved, so there’s no fear of wanton copyright takedowns or accusation of platform rule violation. And, for the most part, it’s also a pretty human-powered sector.
Clipping, before it was even known by that name, was pioneered in its modern form by Andrew Tate, who rode the traction to outsize international recognition in the early part of the decade. The problem: A lot of those people still only know the manosphere creep through his clips and not his full videos, where his ugly visions are actually laid out in full. Some fans profess they know Tate mainly as a fitness guy who occasionally makes racist and sexist jokes, and justify those statements by invoking the game at hand here: To them, Tate has to get a rise out of people in order to travel across the algorithm, so his anti-Indian screeds are just performative, meant to game the algorithm. (To be clear, Tate’s bigotry is consistent, and not just honed for the algorithms.)
That obviously does not explain all of Tate’s influence. It’s easy for casual scrollers to live in ignorance, but there remain many factors behind what really, viscerally appeals to the masses at any given moment. The benefit of a push by the clip warriors doesn’t make Dijon’s Baby any less sublime as a work of music. But it’s also true, as data analysts tend to point out, that certain beneficiaries have way more view counts from clips than they do on their own longer videos, and they still may not have that many overall followers, relatively. (You might know who Clavicular is—but there’s a good chance you don’t actively follow him on Kick, or anywhere else.) That also means, for many creators, the best chance at any sort of visibility or attention is via clipping. When Instagram head Adam Mosseri posted a Reel stating that any Instagram posts that just aggregate other people’s creative works would be downranked by the recommendation algorithm, a bunch of creators responded not with relief but with another question: “Can we just go back to followers seeing the accounts they follow?” The rub is that these platforms have been geared toward recommendation engines over direct influencer-and-follower relationships for a while now. Our collective engagement with all the internet has to offer is shallower, more distant, and more processed than ever—and that’s even being encouraged by stakeholders like NBA Commissioner Adam Silver, who recognizes that sensational highlight reels of eye-popping dunks and turnovers can be used to get social media scrollers more interested in the game as a whole.
And therein lies another problem: A lot of users also aren’t following the clips through to their primary sources, because everything is being clipped and pushed in their faces now. Thanks to the deluge, there’s less incentive for anyone to go from a clip to watching full-length Twitch streams or hourslong NFL games, unless the short videos are frequent and outrageous enough to spark a Conversation—or to give you a more generous, favorable view of Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson than they actually deserve. You don’t know them outside of the clips–slash–paid ads, but you feel like you do, which makes it all the more difficult for actually scrupulous journalists and fact-finders to break through and correct the record. The future is more and more paid ads that no one recognizes as paid ads. No wonder more people are going analog—oh, wait, was that a paid op as well?
