YouTube removed videos linked to a network of AI-supercharged “ghost creators” after Semafor exposed a new online business seeking to capitalize on the platform’s advertising by churning out cheap, sensationalized political videos.
“We have strict policies against spam and deceptive practices,” the company told Semafor in a statement. “After a review, we terminated 20 channels — including all 13 referenced in this article and seven related channels — for violating our spam policies.”
The enforcement action targeted accounts named in Semafor’s report this week on the phenomenon of “ghost creators” — social media accounts in which human actors reading scripts pose as independent commentators to stoke partisan outrage, juice engagement, and rake in ad revenue.
An investigation by Semafor alongside Jeremy Carrasco and Mason Broxham, two researchers with Riddance AI, traced one sprawling network back to Caleb Chan, a financial YouTuber-turned-growth-hacker whose companies hired spokespeople to read clicky, AI-generated scripts. The majority of these videos featured heated — and often inaccurate — attacks on Democratic politicians like California Gov. Gavin Newsom and New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
Most of the channels Semafor analyzed in this week’s report were unavailable as of Thursday; some displayed a message indicating they’d been taken down for violating YouTube’s rules, while others appeared to have been deleted or scrubbed of content by their owners.
Chan confirmed the details of the reporting on Thursday but cast himself as an ideological rather than cynically commercial figure, and complained that Semafor’s coverage was a “hit piece.” He had “created a modern media studio of 97 news anchors, editors, and scriptwriters on YouTube,” he wrote on X, where his handle is @calebgoesviral, and “shared detailed exposés of hypocritical socialists like Mamdani.”