The $35-an-hour private jet
A plywood fuselage in Boyle Heights rents for less than dinner. A real grounded Gulfstream costs twelve times more. The economics of the fake-jet studio, and the correction the press never printed.
Reporter
Author: Staged Desk
Belle Gibson: the wellness blogger who never had cancer
The Federal Court of Australia fined Belle Gibson A$410,000. The largest single count was not about the cancer she never had. It was about a week of app sales owed to a sick child.
Comparison was always the product
A fake jet is $34.99 an hour. A real one is $425. Between those two numbers sits an entire supply chain — not a conspiracy, just a market. The case for literacy over outrage.
Authenticity standards, version 9.3
The internal document a fictional talent agency issues to its clients, explaining in numbered clauses how to appear to be a person. Satire.
The follower factory: what a fake audience actually costs
Followers cost about a cent each. Clicks cost less. Here is the documented price list, the two regulators who called it illegal, and the honest limits of the data.
Who pays for the candid photo
A publicist says he paid a star $50,000 for a couple of street shots. A declared sponsored post from the same tier costs over $1M. That gap explains the whole staged-candid economy.
One in three: what Meta’s own researchers wrote down
A 2019 internal slide said “we make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls.” Meta says the Journal mischaracterised small self-report studies. Both things can be read from the same documents — and now a jury has weighed in.
Trellis Audience Group PLC: annual report and accounts
A fictional engagement-services company reports a solid year. The letter to shareholders is confident, the segments are growing, and the risk factors are load-bearing. Satire.
$1.26 million for one Instagram post: the SEC crypto ledger
A running tally of the celebrities the SEC has charged over undisclosed crypto promotion, what each one paid, and the FTX defendants who mostly won.
The disclosure rules everyone is breaking
$53,088 per violation, a 5-0 vote, more than 700 companies already on notice - and, so far, not a single penalty judgment under the FTC's flagship fake-reviews rule.
The study where nobody could tell
144 Dutch girls could not distinguish reshaped Instagram photos from real ones — and rated the fakes higher. What that experiment supports, what the contested wider literature does not, and why design beats headlines.
Forty seconds on Vaughan Street
Five people remember the same forty seconds outside a bakery. No two accounts agree on the weather, the fruit, the dog or who was filming. Everyone is certain. Satire.