Pictures taken from Facebook and YouTube
You may occasionally be subjected to misinformation if you’re on social media. That’s not new. In the age of AI (or LLMs), though, it’s becoming more rampant, and Netflix is the subject of a lot of fake news, posters, and trailers, and it’s only getting worse. While every platform hosts their fair share, none come close to what’s happening on Facebook.
Misinformation on Facebook has been true for years now. We’ve covered multiple instances of pages like Netflix Fans Live Here (who was promoting a White Chicks 2 movie this morning that doesn’t exist) and Netflix Updates, both run by Gamurs Group, spreading misinformation on the platform in even recent months. Going back further, we’ve also covered false release dates, renewals that haven’t happened, and projects that don’t exist, but the proliferation of AI has made it 10x worse. In particular, the ability to make half-convincing images with well-known stars gives you a chance at going super viral. We covered this recently with Wednesday and a first-look picture of Lady Gaga, which looked incredibly convincing.
https://twitter.com/FreddyInSpace/status/1899149218268279264
Often accruing tens of thousands of likes and no doubt millions of views, fake Netflix posters are absolutely rampant right now.
Take Buds for instance. Some posts have been promoting this supposed Netflix project for months. Depending on which page you see advertising it, it’s either a series or a movie that will star Adam Sandler and Jim Carrey running a dispensary. Only, it doesn’t exist. One of the most viral pictures has clocked in over 110,000 likes from an account called Kim Jeffreyx, who boasts over 100,000 followers. Booting up his page, you’ll find dozens upon dozens of fake posters with very little engagement, but when they do pop off – boy, they pop off. Of course, Buds doesn’t exist, and while a few commenters clearly can spot that it’s artificially generated, many cannot. You can see dozens of these posters going viral on Facebook, and they even caught my younger sister, who is in her early 20s, off guard. A few weeks ago, I received a WhatsApp from her asking if it was real – facepalm.
Another one I caught this morning was a poster for Love Actually: Always and Forever, a supposed sequel to Love Actually coming out on Netflix in 2025. No such movie is in the works at Netflix or anywhere else for that matter. That fact is even acknowledged by the page on the website address it added to the fake synopsis.
What is going on? What do these pages have to gain from spreading these fake posters? Clicks and money. In recent years, Facebook has begun paying its creators through a bonus program, which can be very lucrative (full disclosure: we partake in this scheme). Then, most attach website links to their posters, teasing more information that often contradicts what’s said in the post or the ability to download the movie. What are these websites? They are absolutely loaded with adverts or, worse, loaded with malware.
Where are these pages and websites based? Facebook doesn’t provide much information about who owns individual pages, but we did notice many of the pages that are the worst offenders are often from Asia, such as Vietnam, Indonesia, and India.
This phenomenon is widespread on Facebook but extends to YouTube. I’m sure we’ve all been caught out at one time or another. Just this morning, I was searching YouTube for Netflix Anime, and a One Piece season 2 trailer popped up first in the results. Completely fake, although it does have parts that are certainly convincing. Then there’s the case of this extraordinary account that I encountered a few weeks back that uses AI to… enlarge some aspects of characters in Netflix shows.
Facebook removed fact-checkers earlier this year in favor of a community notes system that’s similar to the one used on X. This hasn’t rolled out yet, but it cannot come at a moment too soon.
We’ll see if platforms can start cleaning up this mess in the weeks, months, and years to come or if it’ll continue to get worse as the adoption of these tools will undoubtedly flood the internet with even more crap. Either way, the internet is probably dying. Or is it already a zombie?
