Chapter 9: Elon Musk's deepfake | reel talk | a winner of a chicken dinner
Hi, it's been awhile
Down a Another Strange Internet Rabbit Hole: Elon Musk and Deepfakes
Wow, Substack just called me out for not writing recently. I started writing this post back in April and then put it on the back burner to focus on some other work. And now we’re in July. How did that happen? Does anyone else feel like time is flying by too fast and they’re constantly playing catch up? It feels like just yesterday I was scrambling to plan out my daughter’s summer camp schedule and now she’s halfway through summer break.
I started writing this post about a social media manager of Elon Musk’s Chinese doppleganger (yes, you read that right) back in April, right around when Musk announced he was acquiring Twitter. So it feels appropriate to finally finish this post when the Twitter/Musk corporate saga has come full circle with Musk trying to pull a:
by announcing this week that he’s backing out of the deal. And Twitter’s Board is all like:
A few weeks ago (back in April that is) a video popped up on my FYP. It was a Tik Tok of a cheerful and goofy guy who looked uncannily like Elon Musk and goes by the account name ‘Yilong Ma'. He was standing in front of a Tesla in what appeared to be a rural part of China, speaking a string of words in broken English that didn’t really make any sense. I was immediately intrigued.
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
And I had so many questions. Where in China does he live? What is his deal? Is he Uighur? So I DMed the account (because why not.) I got a response:
Hi Meng, my client does not do interviews without compensation. But if you want to interview me about how it's like to manage a famous TikTok account as a college student feel free to email me back lol.
And I thought: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ YOLO.
To be clear, this story is not about Elon Musk. The Richest Man in the World who somehow also has time to be #1 Shitposter on Twitter doesn’t need more coverage.
Some facts about Yilong Ma:
He may possibly be a deepfake (more on that later.) Despite Marco being the person that handles of all his Tik Tok content and managing inbound communication, he has never talked to Yilong Ma face-to-face. Every time Marco has requested a video call, Yilong Ma has evaded the question and responded via text or voice memo. So Marco couldn’t confirm my question that Yilong Ma legitimately looks like Elon Musk.
He lives in the Hebei, a province in Northeastern China close to Beijing. Hebei is part of a large swath of interior China that is poor and under-developed, in comparison to the wealthy cities of Beijing and Shanghai, and the manufacturing hub of the coastal South.
He charges $1,000/second for brand deals. Yes, you heard that right. I find Ma’s pricing strategy to be interesting in that it is so plainly transactional.
And yes, even at that rate, he has gotten lots of inbound partnership requests. Most of the proposals are from crypto and NFT projects, as well as gaming companies. And one particularly horrifying company - makers of a tiny gun on a keychain that can shoot real mini bullets. This list of companies tells you a lot about Elon Musk’s fan base, as ostensibly, they want to work with Ma based on his physical likeness to Musk.
He does not speak English. All of the English he speaks in his videos are him reading different Mandarin characters, that when strung together, sound similar phonetically to the English words he’s trying to say. Any person who speaks Mandarin can attest to the fact that this is a really difficult way of speaking English.
His ultimate goal is to make enough money to access a visa to move to the US.
So who is Marco, Yilong Ma’s US Social Media Manager? He is from Hangzhou, a large city just south of Shanghai. He moved to the US by himself when he was in high school to attend boarding school in Wisconsin. Marco’s a Sophomore at a college in Massachusetts. He got the job by DM-ing Yilong Ma and telling him that his American social media strategy sucks and he can help Ma get more followers and land more brand deals. But he’s not just a social media manager. He’s a Comp Sci and Math double major, is a member of a frat, started his school’s first Crypto Club, and DJs in his ‘spare’ time. Even typing out all of his activities is making me tired - I could barely handle the standard course load of one major during college.
I asked Marco how he would feel if the rumors of Yilong Ma being a deepfake turned out to be true. He shrugged and said, “well, if people think he looks like Elon Musk and find it entertaining, and I still get paid, then it doesn’t matter that much to me.” I pushed him a little bit more on the issue around promoting fake/doctored content on the internet and the slippery slope that it can turn into. We ended up getting into a big debate about America’s moral righteousness, and essentially, how annoying it is. One of the big issues Marco has with the US is its sense of moral superiority over China, when in fact it’s worse here because we live with a false sense of free speech, freedom of the press and access to uncensored information. Our ideologies and beliefs are just as manipulated by money, politics, and algorithms.
As it turns out, Yilong Ma has been deemed a deepfake and China has shut down his Douyin and Weibo accounts, although it’s not clear how this information has been verified. Yilong Ma’s US Tik Tok account is still live and as of this month, he is still posting content. So…watch his videos while you can? Now I watch his videos to try to spot the markers of a deepfake face.
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
Reel Talk
One of the reasons why I haven’t written in awhile is because I’ve been suffering from content creation fatigue. (Seriously, social media content creators, how do you do it?! It’s exhausting.) It’s time consuming, and different platforms and mediums require different kinds of content. It’s also a long-term, top of funnel play for new brands, so hard to measure impacts, especially at the beginning.
I’ve talked to a lot of early-stage founders and solo entrepreneurs who are managing their own social accounts, and they all unilaterally dislike creating social media content, but see it as a necessary part of doing business. Instagram in particular is challenging - engagement is dropping, it’s getting harder to reach new audiences, and Meta keeps releasing new features and changing the algorithm which forces content creators to continually change their tactics. But if you are trying to reach Millennials and older, that demographic is still on Instagram. Now that I’ve been creating Instagram content for a couple of months now, what have I learned?
Reels is the only way to organically reach new audiences on Instagram now. Instagram has explicitly stated that in their their new product releases - they are pushing out Reels content in order to compete with Tik Tok.
I’ve noticed that most of the Reels content that Instagram is pushing out is still very…Instagram-y…is the best way I can describe it. A lot of Reels is static images or very short videos overlaid with music tracks. There isn’t a lot of the long-form, educational, editorial content that you see on Tik Tok. Tik Tok is starting to resemble Youtube and TV, while Reels resembles a video version of Instagram. Do you use an iPhone? If you do, you know how Photos has that feature where they’ll sometimes send you a slide show montage of videos and photos in your photo album combined with a cheesy music track? That’s what Reels reminds me of.
I find that Reels content messes up the aesthetics of the ‘grid’ on an Instagram account. As someone who has been conditioned for years to think of the grid aesthetics (most social media management tools are designed to help you plan your IG grid), it’s hard to shift that mindset.
Some brands manage the Grid vs. Reels issue by never posting Reels content to their grid, so those videos only live in the Reels tab. There’s another in-between solution where you can add a cover to a Reels video so it visually fits in with the rest of the grid. There’s also a theory floating around that posting to Reels only gets more views. I’ve tested both posting to just Reels and to Reels & the grid and results are pretty inconclusive.
Now that I’ve got a couple months worth of content, I have data to better understand what performs and what doesn’t. Interestingly, but also unsurprisingly, the results are very similar to what I saw on the Native brand:
Memes perform the best
After that it’s product images
Lifestyle/pictures of people perform the worst
It makes sense that content that solicits a reaction performs the best. And with lifestyle images, especially in the baby/kid space, it’s so saturated and hard to compete with influencers that have broad reach. Lifestyle images is almost filler content at this point, to give an account a human element.
Anyway, I’ll be here, just brainstorming more content ideas and making awkward videos.
Cheesy Ritz Cracker Chicken Tenders
I’ve only recently discovered that crushed up ritz crackers is a better version of bread crumbs. Cause it’s got more sodium, so naturally kids will eat it up. But really, it’s got the perfect blend of saltiness and cheesiness, and the sour cream in this recipe keeps the chicken juicy. My kids rated it 10/10, would eat again. Here’s an adapted version from the NYTimes Cooking recipe:
Ingredients:
1/4 cup sour cream (or mayo if you really want to go crazy)
1 large egg white
1 sleeve of Ritz crackers, crushed up into a bread crumb like consistency
1 cup of shredded cheddar cheese
~2 lbs. of boneless chicken breasts, pounded so it’s about 1/2 inch thick
1/2 tsp garlic powder
1/2 tsp onion powder
salt, olive oil
Cooking Instructions:
pre-heat oven to 450 degrees
butterfly the chicken breasts, pound so it’s ~1/2 in thick and cut into chicken tender style strips, season with salt
in one bowl combine sour cream, egg white and dijon mustard
in a separate bowl combine crushed up ritz crackers (I crush them up with my hands), shredded cheese, onion powder, garlic powder and 1 tablespoon of olive oil
dredge chicken cutlets in the sour cream combo and then dredge in ritz cracker mixture
place chicken tenders flat on a baking sheet, bake in oven for ~20 minutes
If you want to load your kids up with even more sodium, serve with Annie’s Mac & Cheese:
Miscellaneous Links
Over the past year, I’ve received an endless (and growing) stream of odd spam text messages. Texts that say things like “Excuse me, is this Dr. So and So at the pet hospital? My dog is sick.”, “Hey, when can I pick up my order of wine?”, “Hi, I missed you at our college reunion!” I’ve been trying to figure out what is going on. And does this person really think i’m a vet? Well, someone did the research and figured it out. It’s a complex fraud scheme that often involves (of course), crypto.
Escapism, relaxation and connection: Youtube’s 2022 Culture & Trends Report.
Note: this article is from April but three months later, I still think it’s relevant. The visual of a bunch of microinfluencers screaming “Do you know who I AM?!” is endlessly funny. Has Netflix already optioned the rights to this article for a documentary? I can’t wait.