Before this year, the Virginia singer/rapper Shaboozey was best-known for having a song on the Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse soundtrack. This year, however, Shaboozey’s combination of country and rap has taken off big-time. His J-Kwon-interpolating down-home drinkers’ anthem “Tipsy (A Bar Song)” is the #1 single in America, and it’s held that spot for six weeks. It’s taken work to get Shaboozey to that point, and some of the work apparently involves a gross little marketing firm that’s paid to make fake fan TikTok pages that run “fan fiction” stories about artists.

Yesterday, Billboard ran an interview with Ethan Curtis, founder of the digital marketing agency PushPlay. Curtis is also in charge of WtrCoolr, a PushPlay spinoff that exists to create “fan fiction” for artists. The people behind stars like Shaboozey and Young Nudy hire WtrCoolr to splice together TikTok videos about things that are not true, like the idea that Shaquille O’Neal is a Young Nudy superfan or that Dolly Parton is Shaboozey’s godmother. The latter story, which is a lie, comes from ShaboozeysVault, a WtrCoolr-created campaign. The ShaboozeysVault TikTok and Instagram pages have since been taken down — Shaboozey presumably doesn’t need that anymore — but they used video editing and AI to sell that lie. (The Young Nudy page, meanwhile, is still up.)

@frasier7989 #duet with @Shaboozeys Vault #shaboozey ♬ original sound – Shaboozeys Vault

Ethan Curtis tells Billboard, “We are huge fans of pop culture, fan fiction and satire. We see it as creating our own version of a Marvel Universe but with pop stars.” Other than that just being annoying, there’s the problem that plenty of people think those stories are true. When asked about essentially spreading disinformation, Curtis says:

I don’t know if anything is really bad. We don’t claim for it to be true, and we’re just having fun, weaving stories and basically saying, “Wouldn’t it be funny if?” or, “Wouldn’t it be heartwarming if?” I don’t think we’re really ever touching on stuff that’s of any importance, that could lead to any negative energy or backlash. We’re just trying to make fun stuff that fans enjoy. Just fun little moments. It’s no different from taking a video out of context and slapping meme headings on it…

I could see a label coming to us and asking us to test how a new post-beef collab between Drake and Kendrick would be received, for example. They could say, “Can you create a post about this and we can see if people turn on Kendrick for backtracking, or if fans will lose their shit over them coming together?” We could see if it’s a disaster or potentially the biggest release of their careers… I mean, if it’s been so successful on socials, why wouldn’t it be so successful in real life?

The profiles of those WtrCoolr pages include disclaimers like this: “Young Nudy’s #1 Fan Page and Fan Fiction.” The videos themselves don’t include any such disclaimers, though Curtis says, “A lot of videos we just do Easter eggs at the end that make it sort of apparent that it’s a joke.” This is so obviously gross and shitty, and they should stop doing all of it and feel deep existential shame for the rest of their lives.