Earlier this month, Futurism published an exposé about a company called Brown Brothers Media.
In the story, we investigated how the company buys struggling news sites and turns them into high-traffic AI-powered content mills rife with plagiarism, fabulism, and the use of fake authors identified as journalists and subject matter experts with fraudulent credentials. (In a follow-up piece, we explored how one of the company’s founders has an extensive history with Ghislaine Maxwell, the imprisoned collaborator of the notorious predator Jeffrey Epstein.)
The preponderance of Brown Brothers Media’s traffic seemed to come from Google. The content farming network appeared to have figured out how to masterfully exploit the company’s platforms with its AI articles, often dominating the very top of Google News’ “For You” tab with formerly reputable publications it had acquired including VegOut, Silicon Canals, and Space Daily — frequently publishing extremely long and emotionally manipulative headlines that crowded out real journalism with many slight variations on the same story.
