“I was approached by a guest blogger,” recalls Rob Waugh. “But there were no traces of that person on the internet, just dead ends. I thought: This person doesn’t exist.”
That was the unsettling moment that started UK tech journalist Waugh on his ongoing investigations into a world where nonexistent experts are making PR agencies and publishers real money.
His breakthrough was the discovery of a second “ghost influencer” when he sent out a call for a psychologist who could give an opinion for an article he was writing— ironically as it turned out—on the impact of identify theft.
One of those who responded, called Barbara Santini, had already been quoted numerous times in major media publications, including Vogue, Cosmopolitan, and UK papers The Sun, The Daily Mail, and Metro.
But when Waugh began browsing through Santini’s credentials, he was surprised to find that, despite her claiming a master’s degree in Psychology, Philosophy and Linguistics from University of Oxford, the only verifiable links to any professional work were with online sex shop Peaches and Screams and some CBD brands. The photo pictured here was used across that handful of profiles.
There were other things that seemed suspicious to Waugh: “Real psychologists don’t respond to people two minutes after a request with twelve carefully crafted paragraphs of copy.”
antini’s bio at Peaches and Screams paints a vivid picture of someone “on a mission to make sex advice as accessible as a good cup of tea and to shatter taboos across all cultural corners. When she’s not busy revolutionizing the way we talk about sex, Barbara’s diving into her delightfully eccentric hobbies. She floats her way through yoga classes (yes, on water!), hunts down the most fabulous vintage
fashion finds, and loves cracking the codes in escape rooms.”
Digging deeper, Waugh began to suspect that Santini, not only wasn’t an Oxford-educated psychologist, but that she wasn’t a real person. Looking at her writing samples, he spotted clues that her content could be the creation of AI. Writing subheads in title-case was one subtle peculiarity. It’s a US stylistic standard, and one that a professional UK journalist would be unlikely to use (UK style favors sentence-case). For a chatbot like Chat GPT, trained on American content, it would be fairly typical output.
Santini’s insights and quotes appeared in lifestyle pieces that covered a spectrum or topics—“Cringey or cute?: Top couples’ pet names revealed” or “The signs you’re primarily attracted to intelligence over looks – and why it can be considered controversial” or “What happens if you don’t cry? Is stopping tears bad?”
“Santini would comment on anything,” says Waugh. “She can create comments instantly, using ChatGPT, because she doesn’t exist.”
Waugh finally tracked down the home base for Barbara Santini’s expertise.
“I looked into who owned the company that she worked for. I realized that Barbara Santini was actually two Lithuanian men who owned a chain of CBD brands and sex shops and who, I believe, employed a blogger in Nairobi who sent out the copy by email.”
The fake industrial complex
Waugh flagged the fake to the referral service ResponseSource, an agency connecting media outlets with experts and sources for almost every topic imaginable. Services like ResponseSource will often get their expert sources through PR agencies, rarely with diligent vetting of the experts put forward. As long as the PR agency pays its bill, few questions are asked.
“ResponseSource said ‘We’ve given the person a final warning.” Waugh laughs. “Why have they given them a final warning? The person doesn’t exist.”
In partnership with Press Gazette, Waugh published a full investigation into the Santini hoax and others. For the piece, Press Gazette tried to contact Santini directly and were threatened with legal action if they continued to pursue the matter—followed then by complete silence. The piece resulted in embarrassed mainstream media outlets quickly pulling their Barbara Santini content or issuing retractions.
With his eyes opened to telltale signs of non-humanity in jounalism, Waugh began to spot other fake contributors. Looking for expert input for an environmental piece he was working on, he encountered a thought leader whose background included no verifiable expertise and different bio pictures on things she had written.
“To me this is a story about journalistic ethics. It’s about people attempting to fool news outlets. But I realized that for other people it’s a purely technical issue. The people who do this are SEO guys, and what they are trying to do is boost EEAT, a method Google uses to rank sites based on the expertise they have represented. If your site is associated with a widely cited expert, or publication, you can boost its ranking.”
Within the SEO industry, the creation of fake contributors is now incentivized to the point. It is much more common than most readers would guess.
Money for nothing
Waugh has since “gone down a rabbit hole”, as he puts it, into an ongoing investigation of the fake expert phenomenon and has encountered new methods companies are using to generate fake expert content, that make the idea of individual ghost influencer seem quaint. Now there are networks that produce thousands of AI-generated publications which, from server to screen, never pass through a human being.
“They spew news 24/7 with the goal of getting onto Google Discover. Some of the people who operate these have become millionaires. These fake publications are outranking real ones staffed by human journalists.”
Some news outlets are tightening up the verification process for experts, although it often falls on individual journalists to do the actual legwork. Yahoo News, for example, now requires two kinds of ID verification for any expert a freelancer quotes in a piece.
News networks have also sent out warnings for journalists not to automatically trust experts provided by services like ResponseSource, where their identity cannot be independently verified. ResponseSource is also reportedly upgrading its protocols for expert authenticity.
In a world where content can be monetized by consistently hitting certain algorithmic targets at scale, these fixes still duck the main problem of a system that rewards dumping hard-won, but time-consuming and expensive, human expertise.
“The time pressure on journalists to deliver yards and yards in increasingly less time of copy for increasingly less money means we’re more vulnerable.
“The financial motivation for doing this is extremely real. And journalists are going to deal with more and more fake people.”