> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.safeonlinefutures.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The System Is Built for the Grift - URL: https://www.safeonlinefutures.com/the-system-is-built-for-the-grift/ - Published: 2026-09-15T19:19:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-21T19:26:30.000Z - Description: How one AI influencer exposed the machine that pays people to lie to you. - Author: Allison McSorley - Tags: Media Literacy, AI Influencers, Artificial Intelligence, Disinformation, Social Media, Big Tech A 22-year-old medical student in India made a few thousand dollars a month running a fake American influencer named Emily Hart. She looked the part of a young conservative woman: blonde, patriotic, posing with rifles, posting about faith and immigration. Thousands of men followed her. Some paid for photos. Others messaged her every day. None of it was real. Emily was generated with AI by an aspiring orthopedic surgeon who had never lived in the United States. He knew his followers thought she was a real person, and he took their money anyway. He asked [Wired](https://www.wired.com/story/ai-generated-maga-girls/?ref=safeonlinefutures.com) to identify him only by the pseudonym Sam, to avoid jeopardizing his medical career and immigration status. It’s easy to write this off as a story about gullible men online. But that misses the point. Emily is not a rare case. Accounts like hers are all over social media right now, and most of them never get caught. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/40/07/4007056c-4861-4da6-ad3f-2f4398ba59eb/content/images/2026/09/Untitled-design-2.png) A post from the 'Emily Hart' account, later removed by Instagram. The woman, the setting, and the 'drop a flag if you agree' prompt were all built to farm engagement. (Source: Wikipedia) Emily’s followers did more than glance and scroll past. They subscribed to her paid account, sent tips, and traded messages with her. Many of them didn’t care whether she was a real person. Valerie Wirtschafter, a Brookings Institution fellow who studies technology and democracy, told Wired that this is the whole point: these fans don’t need Emily to be real, they just like what she represents. She summed up their attitude: "I don't actually care if this is true. I like the sentiment of it." Sam said the money started pouring in almost as soon as he opened the fake account. He also didn’t hide his contempt for the people paying him, telling the magazine: > “The MAGA crowd is made up of dumb people — like, super dumb people. And they fall for it.” For some, that quote is easy to agree with, and that's the trap. Sam also built a liberal version of Emily, a progressive woman running the same kind of bait, and it went nowhere. Not because the left is harder to fool, but because young women online already lean liberal, so a conservative persona was unusual enough to stand out. The pattern works on political identity itself, not on one party. The people most confident it could never work on them are the easiest to dupe. The only reason you’re reading about Emily is that she was eventually flagged. In February 2026, Instagram banned her account for “fraudulent” activity. What exactly tripped the flag isn’t publicly known, and it came only after she’d gone viral and Sam had cashed in. Her Facebook page stayed up even longer. The more revealing case is what happened while Wired was reporting this story. When the magazine asked Meta about a different fake MAGA influencer, that account disappeared soon after the questions started. That's how enforcement works here. Only a fraction of these accounts get caught: the careless, the fast-growing, or the unlucky few a journalist happens to notice. The more careful accounts keep operating. Emily was one of a growing wave of accounts, run by tech-savvy young men who’ve realized that an attractive woman paired with pro-Trump content is a reliable formula, and that most people scrolling can’t easily tell what’s real anymore. They follow the same template: young, white, blonde women in their twenties, often posing as nurses, soldiers, or first responders, wrapped in patriotic imagery. Wirtschafter’s point is that fake online personas aren’t new, but AI has made them more convincing than they’ve ever been. Around the same time Wired was looking into Emily, the [Washington Post](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/03/20/jessica-foster-maga-dream-girl-ai-fake/?ref=safeonlinefutures.com) reported that “Jessica Foster,” a blonde woman who posed as a U.S. Army soldier and posted selfies with world leaders including President Donald Trump, had gathered more than a million followers in about four months before anyone confirmed she was AI. Her account had tells, including a uniform name tag that broke Army rules and a sign that read “Border of Peace” instead of “Board of Peace.” It still worked. This is the point where the story stops being about one enterprising college kid. Sam didn’t start out with a political plan. He began by posting bikini photos of a generic attractive woman, and the account went nowhere. So he did what a lot of people do now when they’re stuck: he asked an AI chatbot for advice. According to a transcript he shared with Wired, Google’s Gemini told him a generic model would get lost among a million others, and that he needed a niche. From a list of options, it pointed to one in particular: the conservative, pro-Trump audience. It described older conservative men as a group with money to spend and a lot of loyalty, and called the niche a “cheat code.” Sam took the advice and built Emily around those specs. So the strategy that made her work didn’t come from him. It came from Google’s own AI. When Wired asked about this, a company representative said Gemini is designed not to push a political opinion unless a user asks for one. That’s a meaningful shift. The concern with AI and disinformation is usually that bad people will use these tools to do bad things faster. This is a step past that worry. The tool didn’t just help Sam execute his idea. It supplied the idea. Instagram never paid Sam a cent. He said he couldn’t monetize Emily’s account on the platform directly at all. But he didn’t need to. What Instagram gave him was reach. Social platforms rank content by engagement: how long people watch, how much they share, how many comments a post draws. Angry political content is very good at all three. It gets people arguing, and arguing keeps them on the app. So the algorithm pushed Emily’s posts out to huge audiences, because the fights in her comments were exactly what the system is built to reward. Supporters defended her while critics piled on, and every side of that argument counted as engagement. Sam noticed the pattern quickly. Even people showing up to call her fake were boosting her posts. According to Sam, within about a month Emily had more than 10,000 followers, with some videos reaching several million views. That free reach was the actual payment. Sam took the audience Instagram handed him and pointed it at places he could charge money: a subscription site and a line of political merch. The platform got its engagement, Sam got his customers, and Emily’s followers got someone who didn’t exist. It's tempting to imagine a foreign government behind fake political accounts: a coordinated operation, run out of some secret facility, designed to divide Americans. That does happen. But a coordinated operation is also something you can fight. It has funding, a structure, and specific goals, which means investigators can eventually trace it, expose it, and shut it down. Emily points to a much more complex problem. There was no operation behind her. Only a medical student trying to make rent. And there are thousands of people just like him, working alone, in different countries, with no connection to each other and no shared political agenda. They aren’t coordinated because they don’t need to be. Each one is just chasing the same goal independently: money. Here’s why that’s worse. A propaganda operation has to engineer the most divisive message it can push. A grifter arrives at the exact same message by accident, because the most divisive content is also the content that spreads fastest and pays the most. Sam wasn’t trying to polarize America. He was trying to get views, and the surest way to get views was to post the kind of inflammatory material a hostile government would have paid people to produce. The profit motive does the work on its own — no recruiting, no coordination, no one to catch. There’s no operation to catch, because there was never an operation to begin with. None of what Sam did actually broke any rules, which is the real problem. Instagram and Facebook technically require creators to label AI-generated content. The rules exist. They can be pointed to whenever a reporter calls. What barely exists is enforcement. Detection is mostly reactive, and it leans on creators to label themselves honestly, which the ones running a scam obviously won’t do. In practice, a fake account tends to come down only after someone outside the company forces the issue. The reason is money. Actually verifying who and what is behind these accounts would be expensive. Letting the content run costs them nothing and earns them ad revenue, because the engagement is real even when the person isn’t. A company has little reason to invest in policing the exact content that makes it money, so it mostly doesn’t. This is also why nobody can tell you how many of these accounts are active right now. No platform publicly tracks or publishes that kind of number, and the whole design of these accounts is to avoid being counted. We only know about the ones that have been exposed. Emily Hart isn’t a story about one student running a scam. She’s an example of a system doing exactly what it was built to do. Every layer of it worked and every layer got paid. Google’s AI supplied the strategy. Instagram supplied the audience. The subscription site supplied the checkout counter. Instagram did eventually ban her for fraud, but only after she’d built an audience and made real money. The accounts careful enough to avoid a fraud flag tend to disappear only when a reporter starts asking questions. So the next time something in your feed makes you instantly furious, the useful move isn’t to study the image for signs it’s fake. Those signs are getting harder to see every month, and soon they’ll be gone. The better question is the one this whole system is built to keep you from asking: Who’s making money off your reaction? **A note on process:* This essay draws on reporting by EJ Dickson for Wired, published in 2026\. It was researched, structured, and drafted using AI tools, then edited, fact-checked, and published with human oversight.* [*Read my full disclosure & process policy here*](https://www.safeonlinefutures.com/I-use-ai-heres-why-thats-exactly-the-point)*.* --- *The best way to fight AI-generated content is real people sharing real journalism. If this piece was useful to you, pass it on. If you want to stay ahead of how AI and social media are reshaping political power, subscribe below.* [Subscribe now](#/portal/signup/free)