--- title: "AI “Phone Farm” Startup Gets Funding from Marc Andreessen to Flood Social Media With Spam" description: "Andreessen Horowitz has injected $1 million into Doublespeed, a startup meant to flood social media with gobs of for-profit spam." date: "2025-10-27" modified: "2025-10-27" authors: - name: "Joe Wilkins" job_title: "Correspondent" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/jwilkins" url: "https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/doublespeed-ai-phone-farm" categories: - "Artificial Intelligence" - "Ethics" --- # AI “Phone Farm” Startup Gets Funding from Marc Andreessen to Flood Social Media With Spam ![Andreessen Horowitz has injected $1 million into Doublespeed, a startup meant to flood social media with gobs of for-profit spam.]() *Doublespeed AI* You know those obnoxious social media accounts that flood your messages with spam? Those might not be scammers after all, but a legitimate new business backed by one of the most powerful venture capital funds in Silicon Valley. Introducing Doublespeed, a startup operating a phone farm to flood social media with AI-generated slop on behalf of its clients. In a nutshell, [phone farming]() is a tactic most often used by hackers and financial criminals to use large numbers of devices to send spam texts, farm social media engagement, or generate fake reviews. On its website, the fledgling company bills itself as a "bulk content creation" service. Basically, it lets customers "orchestrate actions on thousands of social accounts through both bulk content creation and deployment." It does this through "instrumented human action," a fancy phrase meaning the company's phone bots will somehow mimic "natural user interaction on physical devices to get our content to appear human to the algorithims \[sic\]." In a [post on X-formerly-Twitter](), Doublespeed co-founder Zuhair Lakhani even boasts that they used AI to write the company's code. "Claude code is truly our third cofounder," he wrote. https://twitter.com/rareZuhair/status/1981045443607028087 The whole thing is backed by a [$1 million cash injection]() from a16z, also known as Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capitalist firm founded by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz back in 2009. Doublespeed clients can expect to pay anywhere between $1,500 and $7,500 a month for access to its phone farm. As [*404 Media* notes](), the service is obviously a violation of the terms of agreement for the top social media platforms. Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook for example, prohibits posting, sharing, or engaging content "at very high frequencies," and [specifically disallows]() "selling, buying, or exchanging for engagement, such as likes, shares, views, follows, clicks, use of specific hashtags, etc." X, LinkedIn, and Reddit have similar policies, though it's becoming increasingly unclear if any of these platforms are particularly interested in actually enforcing policies against spam bots. Users on each site have [grown]() [more and more]() [frustrated]() lately as AI-powered bot accounts are allowed to infest [every last corner]() of the internet, an issue which tech critic Cory Doctorow calls "[platform decay]()." Ironically, many of those platforms are also being eaten away by [AI-powered content moderation]() — a cost-cutting strategy which saves tech companies the hassle of outsourcing content management to [sweat shop workers]() in Africa. Oddly enough, it may be one of the peak signs of our time: a million-dollar gamble on a for-profit company whose entire model relies on monetizing spam. Who said capitalism has to breed innovation? **More on AI:** *[Parasitic Startup Pollutes Job Market by Applying to Jobs for You Automatically]()* ## Author At Futurism, I focus on the intersection of technology and power — examining the economics, history, and politics behind today’s dystopian headlines. As a writer, I’m interested in topics ranging from AI’s impact on labor to startups nobody asked for. My prior work includes bylines in Jacobin, Verso, and Blue Labyrinths. My work for Futurism has been cited by publications including Forbes, The Guardian, MIT Technology Review, Time, The Nation, Mother Jones, The Verge, and Wired. I grew up in Michigan, attending Central Michigan University as well as Ball State University, where I earned a master of music. I now live in Brooklyn with my girlfriend and our cat Ziti. On weekends, you can find me hunched over a cold pint arguing geopolitics with the other transplants. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()