"The Team of Men Behind Rachel Brewson, the Fake Woman Whose Trump-Fueled Breakup Went Viral "

"Brewson wasn’t a publicity stunt, but an attempt to make money. The character was created by an (all-male) team of internet marketers interested in pushing traffic back to Review Weekly, a site that relied on various internet monetization schemes to try to generate a profit. In the process, they created a bunch of flimsy fake characters to write posts, and an unusually detailed one: Rachel. “She” got published on a few big sites—xoJane, Thought Catalog, Elite Daily—appeared on TV (where the company hired amateur actors to play her and Todd), and left a trail of profiles that remain on the internet to this day... 

Review Weekly was set up to make money by getting people to click through to their site from other, bigger sites. Everything depended on getting people to click back to Review Weekly, but not on making the content of the site itself any good. It was all incredibly generic: reviews of dating apps, security systems, and “subscription boxes” like Birchbox... 

Hyder’s plan was to hire writers to create fake people, and to get real posts published in other, bigger outlets. Naturally, everyone’s author bio on those other sites would link back to Review Weekly.

“I trained my team to write under profiles that we set up,” he told me. “We have an approach where we go after getting syndications and regular slots on other sites like with xoJane, where we can write content regularly.”

Most of Review Weekly’s fake writers aren’t very convincing as people: they have cartoon avatars and identical biographies on Facebook, Twitter, and anywhere elsethey get published...

xoJane wouldn’t let them take down the original photo from the first post, Hyder says (“Rachel” emailed and asked if she could swap out photos, Hyder says, a request that was denied). But otherwise he claims the process of launching a fake person into TV fame was surprisingly easy, even with the picture discrepancy. I asked if anything about it felt unethical, and he said no, pointing out that no one at ABC or Nightline ever asked for ID or any other kind of verification."

http://jezebel.com/the-team-of-men-behind-rachel-brewson-the-fake-woman-w-1787270300

So weird. 

The founder guy sounds like the Worst.