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community weblog
fake lawyers & real harm
Earlier this week, the immigration resource/news site Documented released an investigative report by data journalist Sam Rabiyah that is damning, enraging, and probably unsurprising hereabouts: a look at fake immigration lawyer TikTok accounts, how AI is enabling scammers to prey more efficiently on immigrants, and how AI fuels TikTok's outrage machines with lurid stories of immigrant crime. Today he followed up with a guide allowing others to duplicate this work & help detect false, misleading, & AI-generated content.
Documented spent six months analyzing a sample of 10,000 TikTok posts to understand what risks lie in the ways videos are created and shared by those looking for help on the platform. [...] Through our findings, we uncovered dozens of copycat accounts ripping off legitimate immigration attorneys, some actively scamming immigrants into sending them money, as well as a band of news influencers circulating tropes about immigrants committing crimes to garner popularity. [...] In the process, we realized this technology could be useful to anyone trying to analyze content being shared on TikTok, and so we chose to share our work directly with the public.
The three related Documented reports:
TikTok Lawyers Face Their AI Clones (the original report, side-by-side videos better viewed on big screen)
News Influencers Cash In on the "Criminal Immigrant" Narrative
Follow the Bots: A Technical Guide
posted by miles per flower on Oct 23, 2026 at 10:28 AM
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Wow, how bad is tiktok if their response to false video content is worse than Meta/Facebooks. There is always a lower bar to clear.
posted by Art_Pot at 11:35 AM
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"In the process, we realized this technology could be useful to anyone trying to analyze content being shared on TikTok, and so we chose to share our work directly with the public. In this guide, we walk through our open-source code, step by step, as a primer for how others may build a collective sample of TikTok content from their own community and uncover who drives narratives on the platform and how videos pass between actors."
Excellent that they did that.
posted by storybored at 6:03 PM
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The fun thing is that in the US, it is illegal to provide legal advice is you are not an attorney who has been admitted to the bar in the United States. The same thing is happening with AI-generated websites, and attorneys care about this stuff.
In the meantime, damn we have a lot of work to keep our communities safe.
posted by Silvery Fish at 7:29 PM
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how bad is tiktok
Seems to be enshittifying at about the rate I'd expect for any organization the Ellison family has a hand in.
posted by flabdablet at 12:24 AM
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Post Ellison tiktok is to the 2020s as like 2009-14 reddit was to the internet. Everyone is focused on X-Twitter as being some benchmark for "awful"(just as back then, everyone was focused on 4chan) but compared to 2020-23 or something, it's become a totally deformed right wing nightmare of scams, horrendous behavior, pile-ons, harassment... and just stuff like this.
I've observed pretty much the same amount of misogyny, racism, and general reactionary right wing thought and behavior as Turn Of The 2010s reddit had in the buildup to gamergate and the 2016 election, but also just a large amount of scamming and manipulation even that didn't have.
For as much as it felt like stoned channel surfing cable tv, i really enjoyed that app pre ellison. Now its arguably the most horrifying major platform you can reach from a phone. I genuinely feel like twitter is a lot more tame. Anything you can show me on twitter, i can show you on a larger scale on tiktok.
"Look, people are saying horrifying slurs on twitter and there's 10 in a row". Ok, on tiktok they're doing the same crap maybe slightly obfuscated, but its 300 of them, and they all have hundreds of likes.
Vile cesspit, and very clearly created and shitstirred to kneecap any Palestine activism, student protests, etc.
posted by emptythought at 6:09 PM
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