Once a photo gets on the internet, it can end up anywhere.

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Show Notes

• 0:01 – we have a Patreon now!
• 2:13 – product on Amazon
• 4:10 – Billy’s tweet
• 4:22 – Hellicus’s tweet
• 4:48 – Ryan Broderick
• 7:00 – CCbeauty’s webpage
• 10:00 – HDcrafter link 1
• 11:20 – HDcrafter link 2
• 12:53 – Buzzfeed article
• 14:33 – Medium account
• 15:29 – About.me page
• 17:18 – Mr. Sparkle
• 25:53 – The guy who replaced Ryan is everywhere
• 26:46 – iFlashDeal bib
• 28:26 – Buzzfeed article translated into Chinese
• 29:19 – Francis on 17qq
• 31:56 – Graphika report (via Input)
• 34:07 – foreigner face on Google HK
• 34:26 – foreigner on Google HK
• 34:37 – foreigner face on Baidu
• 35:37 – Baidu source
• 38:15 – New photos from Ryan
• 38:40 – The photo on Amazon has been updated again to a 3rd guy
• 39:14 – Ryan on new products (screenshot)
• 41:03 – Patreon

Transcript

Adrianne: Hey, just wanted to let everyone know we’ve launched a Patreon to support the show. If you want to hear about it, stick around after this episode and you’ll get all the details or go to patreon.com/underunderstood. Here’s the show.
Billy: Hey everybody.
John: Hey Billy.
Regina: Hi
Adrianne: Hi Billy.
Billy: We’re back.
Adrianne: Woah.
Billy: We paused the show right before most of the world started at taking COVID-19 seriously. How long, how long has it been?
Regina: Eight months?
Adrianne: Eight years?
Billy: Yeah, it feels like forever, but anyway, I think since then everyone’s been affected in some way. So we should just start off by saying we are sending our love and solidarity to everyone during these terrible, terrible times, but we’re back and the show isn’t about deadly viruses or anything in the news.
It’s about weird and un-Googleable stories. And I have a truly bizarre one for you today, but I would like to start with a question. What if all of you have been doing for haircuts?
Regina: I haven’t had one, but I regularly go a long time.
Adrianne: I’ve been cutting my bangs. I also tend to go a long time.
John: I, the first two months I didn’t do anything. And then it got so long. I found the only clipper online that I could find. electric clipper and half did my own hair and my girlfriend Caitlin cleaned up my mess. And from then on, she has been cutting my hair every month and a half or so.
Billy: So my wife has been cutting my hair. this is something like, I kind of think we’re going to keep doing by
John: Yes. Yes.
Billy: So early on, we were just using a beard trimmer, cause that’s just all I had. Then we started to get more serious. We graduated from the beard trimmer to like proper hair clippers. And then recently I purchased this thing on Amazon.
I’m gonna drop a link here.
John: Is it a Flowbee?
Billy: Okay. This is not a Flowbee but could someone describe what this is.
Adrianne: The title of this product on Amazon is CCBeauty, hair apron, cape hairstylists, simple design pattern, waterproof hair cut, cloth wrap, protect, parentheses, silver.
Billy: Yeah, of course.
Regina: Very catchy name. Yeah.
Billy: Yeah. CC beauty hair, apron, hairstylist, simple design pattern, waterproof haircut, cloth wrap, protect silver, duh.
Regina: It’s $10.99.
Billy: Yeah. It’s yeah, just under $11. And the photo was just very striking to me. It caught my attention immediately. Could someone described this photo.
John: So we’re looking at a man with gray eyes looking straight into the camera. And then, we don’t see anything below his neck because he’s got this thing wrapped around his neck that looks like a big, yeah, it’s like a hair apron, but like pulled up into a donut around his chest to catch the hair.
Billy: Yeah, it’s just a striking photo. Nothing else. It’s just this, it looks like a decapitated head on top of like a, like an amateur paper craft version of a UFO.
John: It’s really good.
Adrianne: It’s very funny.
It’s really good.
Billy: I knew immediately I had to have this product. I ordered it and I was just kind of anxiously awaiting its arrival at home, staring at my orders page on Amazon.
And I just kept looking at this image, the page where it says your orders and I just thought it was funny. So I screenshotted it and I tweeted it without any context. No comment. I didn’t write anything. I just tweeted the photo.
Regina: It doesn’t even have the product name. It’s just the photo.
Billy: No, it just said your orders and it was a picture of this floating white head on a UFO. And then a little less than an hour after I posted it to someone named Hellicus replied to it on Twitter and said, is that at Broderick? And the next day I ended up on a Google Meet with the person who they tagged.
Hi Ryan, how are you?
Audio: I’m doing good. Definitely had a weird night discovering my face has been stolen.
Billy: So that is, that is Ryan Broderick doing, do any of, you know, Ryan by the way?
Adrianne: I don’t know him personally. I know who he is.
Billy: Yeah. If you’re into digital media or internet culture, you might know him. So I knew of him because when Buzzfeed got into podcasting in 2015, he was on one of the two shows that they launched with at the time. There was Another Round and there was a show called Internet Explorer, which he was a cohost on with Katie Notopoulos.
But anyway, so you might know of him. He also wrote for BuzzFeed for eight years,
Adrianne: Untill he was fired for plagiarism in June.
Billy: Right, yeah. He was recently fired. That’s not super relevant to the story, but it’s help set the scene. So we’re now several months into a pandemic, he’s unemployed and he’s sitting at home and he receives an alert on his phone.
Ryan: I checked my Twitter, got a notification from user Hellicus who I’ve never really interacted with. And they were like, is this Ryan? And I click in and it’s your tweet. And it was an Amazon screenshot that you had, you had taken. And what was super weird was that it was my face in the Amazon screenshot.
And I have never been a professional model for an Amazon store before. So the first thing I did was I, I screenshot your tweet and I sent it to like my family. Cause I was like, okay, if this is my face, they’ll know if this is my face. I don’t want to be like the guy overreacting and being like, this is my face.
Right. Because also, you know, I’m like a white dude in my thirties. There’s like a lot of people that look a lot like me, like I’m not a very distinct looking person. So I was like, is this my face? And then the consensus for everyone I sent it to was like, that’s your face.
Billy: So Ryan got his family to confirm that it was his face. Next, he found this company that was selling this product on Amazon, CCbeauty. He found their website and on their website, they have their address in China and they also have an outlook.com email address. And so he decides to send them an email.
Audio: What I sent them, the subject line is, you’re using my face on your Amazon store. Hi there. My name is Ryan Broderick. I noticed that you’re using a picture of my face on your Amazon store. I’m not mad or anything. I’m a little flattered you think my face is nice enough to advertise haircutting aprons.
I’m a journalist in America, and I’d love to talk to you about it. Feel free to email me back. Thanks.
Billy: Yeah. So what’s interesting to me about this and what’s interesting to me about Ryan is that he doesn’t seem particularly upset about this, right?
Regina: No, he seems fine with it.
Billy: He definitely is curious about how this product ended up on Amazon with his face on it, but he doesn’t seem upset.
Ryan: My mom’s first reaction was that I should go to China and become a model. And I was like, well, thank you, mom. That’s like very nice that you think that I should move to China and become like a model. And like, I don’t hate that idea. I mean, there’s definitely worst ways to live. Yeah. I mean, part of me is like, embrace it, right?
Like if they want, if they think that, I have the face to help them sell a hair cutting apron.
Billy: Yeah. Yeah. This could really jumpstart your foreign modeling career.
Ryan: I mean, I just think that like, you can’t beat them, so you might as well like roll with it.
Billy: So here’s the challenge. I think I obviously want to dig into how this happened, but I also want to see if we can actually get a hold of this company. If we can talk to CCbeauty,
Adrianne: That’s going to be so hard.
John: The problem is probably that Ryan emailed them directly. Right. He should have put them in the CC field.
Billy: God, John. I’ll do my best.
Regina: It’s move John to BCC for the rest of the podcast.
Adrianne: Ooh.
John: Coming up, the Mr. Sparkle of China.
Billy: Welcome back everyone. I have more to share about Ryan and his stolen face. So first off, there is one big thing that I discovered pretty early on, and I shared it with Ryan. It’s another link to something on Amazon. I want to share some links with you.
Ryan: Okay, I’m excited.
Billy: Have you seen this?
Ryan: I have not seen this. Okay, so it’s called HD crafter, polarized aviators, aviators metal frame, sunglasses, black format. So it’s like black sunglasses, like aviators. Okay. Scrolling. There’s like a cool man wearing the sunglasses, as like in the, in the description. Oh, Oh no, no. I’m I’m I’m in here.
This is so weird. Okay. So this is, this is, again, me, it’s the same photo, but they have Photoshopped these aviators onto me. This is so weird.
Billy: Okay. So to be clear, you’ve never, you’ve never worn these glasses.
Ryan: No, I mean, I did go through like a brief aviator phase and the late arts, which I feel like a lot of like emo kids went through. Cause they was like, Oh, that’s cool. Right. But like, you know, I had my Hunter S. Thompson phase, but like. This is not anything I’ve ever seen before. This is unbelievable. Oh my
Billy: Okay. So, and this appears to be a different company or at least a different brand. The other one was what? CC beauty. And this is HD crafter, so, okay. So just file that away. I’m going to send you another link here.
Ryan: Oh my God.
Billy: This is another HD crafter link. Just tell me what you see when you go to this page.
Ryan: I’m like shaking. Okay. So it’s another
Billy: It’s not, there’s nothing to be nervous of. It’s not like one of them’s going to be you like fully nude in the sunglasses or something on Amazon.
Ryan: No. It’s just like, it’s this feeling of like, cause it’s my face. I don’t know what has been done with it. So it’s just like this like deep, like uncanny Valley feeling. Okay.
Billy: get it. Yeah.
Ryan: HD craft air classic aviators metal frames this time. Okay, nice. Pretty normal photographs of the glasses. And then there’s me again.
Oh my God. And I know the person next to me. It’s from the same photo shoot.
Billy: Okay. So you’re talking about, there’s a person to your left into your right on this.
Ryan: The person on my right is a former photographer I used to work with, Laura Gallant, and so she is on this Amazon page as well. With sunglasses attached to her head via Photoshop. Wow. This is blowing my mind.
Billy: So yeah, I sent you guys the page. You could see both of their photos taken in the same style. He has these aviators on his, he has them on his face and this woman who he says his former coworker is also there with them on her forehead. So these photos and the fact that his coworker Laura is in one of them give away where the original photos came from.
Can someone look at this link and tell me what they see.
Regina: It’s a Buzzfeed World article and its headline is, “This is what six faces look like after being Photoshopped by South Korean plastic surgeons.”
Billy: Yes. So this is where the original photos came from and you’ll see the exact same photos of Ryan and his coworker, Laura, in this article. So if you scroll this article, you’ll see that. The premise of this was they took a bunch of people. I think mostly people that were working around the office and they had them all take these sort of mugshot type photos straight on, and then a profile photo, sort of dead faced, you know, no expression.
And then they gave these photos to a Korean plastic surgery firm and had them Photoshop them as if they were Photoshopping what they could do for them as a client.
Adrianne: How do they make your nostrils smaller like that?
John: Ryan did pretty well here. They just took a little off his chin and that was it.
Adrianne: And they made his nostrils smaller.
John: They made his nostrils smaller,
Billy: Yeah. So really the only noticeable thing that they did to him, which they did to everyone was sort of take the skin under his chin in a little bit and make it tighter so that he had a sharper jawline, but these photos from this photo shoot seem to have found their way into all kinds of different corners of the internet.
Okay. Check this one out. Tell me what you see.
Ryan: Okay. So this is a Medium article. Oh my God. Oh dear God. Apparently there’s someone who writing medium pieces under the name keith Murray. He’s a writer in Las Vegas. He Claims he’s the owner of a small car detailing shop. And it’s my face with no sunglasses on it. Just the, just my face. I want to read, I want to read what I’m writing here.
Let’s see. I’m kind of interested in who, you know, let’s see here. So Keith has an article called, “Spray to polish the tires for the perfect styling for the tires.” Dude. That’s a great headline. It’s got everything you need.
Billy: I think this is his only article by the way, to be clear.
Ryan: Yeah, I think he just, so this is clearly just like a content farm thing. This is so weird.
Billy: I’m going to send you one more.
Ryan: Okay. Here I am again. My name is Russell Edmondson. This time I’m a writer, editor and a hairstylist in the USA. I’m interested apparently in cycling and writing. Yeah. I just bought a bike actually. and then interesting. It goes to a link to cartiresguide.page.tl.
Billy: Right, right.
Ryan: Which is another tire site.
Billy: It doesn’t say anything about tires on the page or cars. Really? I guess it says you’re a fan of car of car singular.
Ryan: Yeah. I mean, I’m a fan of car. Yeah, of course.
Billy: So therefore you would be a fan of tire.
Ryan: Well you can’t have a car without tires. Wow. This is so weird.
Billy: Looking at these pages, it seems like this is just some kind of search engine optimization scam and SEO scam on Google. But the point is it’s looking more and more like Ryan’s face is showing up in all different corners of the internet for all kinds of reasons. And he still has no idea why that is happening.
Ryan: I wonder if it just like got used once somewhere.
Billy: Right.
Ryan: By a content farm. And they like kept it in their, like catfish folder. And then they’re like, okay, we need to, like, we need an American guy for this. Let’s let’s like go through our stolen images, photo folder, right. Pick one. And then they like, I’m just in that weird network now.
Billy: Ryan kept referring to this phenomenon as Mr. Sparkle. This is from an episode of the Simpsons where Homer goes with the kids to the Springfield dump, to dispose of their Christmas tree and among the garbage at the dump, he sees a box with his face on it.
Simpsons clip: Okay. Who’s up for some scrounging.
Maybe it’s a box from the future.
What’s going on. Ooh, why am I on a Japanese box?
Regina: That’s really on the nose.
Billy: So in this episode, Homer becomes obsessed with this box
Simpsons clip: Where did it come from? What is it a box of? How’d my face get on it?
Billy: And it turns out that the box is a Japanese brand of dish detergent called Mr. Sparkle. In the episode, Homer basically gets his answer as a result of calling the factory overseas, where the product is made. Now with Ryan, of course, he tried emailing the factory in China that supposedly makes the product with his face on it. But weeks and weeks went by. We didn’t hear anything after he emailed them, we were getting no response.
So I tried contacting CC beauty through Amazon. Amazon claims will get a response from a seller within two days, then a week went by no response. So eventually I
Adrianne: You went to China.
Billy: know eventually I didn’t, I just didn’t try to test fate. You know, the Simpsons predicts everything as we know, and I just tried to do what Homer did.
And I called the phone number on CC beauty’s website, a Chinese phone number.
Audio: This call is being routed by Google. The cost of this call is 2 cents per minute.
Billy: Yeah. So I call and it rings for a long time by my account. It rings about nine times.
Adrianne: Are you going to make us sit through all nine?
Billy: No, no, no, no. I’ll skip ahead here. So eventually I get this message.
Audio: [Chinese language message] Sorry. The subscriber you dialed is not available. Please dial again later.
Billy: There is a pretty big time difference here. I think it’s a 12 hour time difference between where I am and where they supposedly are in China. So periodically on different evenings, late at night, I would just try calling this phone number. And every time I got the same result.
Audio: The subscriber you dialed is not available. Please dial again later.
Billy: It rings through and then that ring ends in some kind of prerecorded message. Right? So it’s not just like a disconnected phone number. It’s ringing somewhere. So I started to think what if someone really is there, you know, and they’re just ignoring it or they can’t get to the phone in time. So I decided one night that I should just try to keep calling back over and over again.
Adrianne: Annoy them into picking up.
Billy: I mean, maybe so after several attempts, part of the way through ringing, it stops. Hello?
Adrianne: Wait, what was that sound? Was that sound from your
Billy: No.
Adrianne: Oh, I’m so spooked.
Billy: Not me. That was them. So like before I decided to just keep going back.
Audio: The cost of this call is 2 cents per minute.
Billy: I’m just going to keep retrying. And just as I’m calling back on, I want to say the 11th attempt or so I get a text. It is in Chinese. Okay. They just texted me, let me translate this.
Audio: I will call you back later. I will call you back later.I
John: I will call you back later.
Billy: And this was all happening sort of simultaneously, like I was still trying to call while I was getting these texts and then trying to rig up Google translate and then trying to translate it. And so there were still like calls happening. And so I think I was like in the middle of calling them again and I hang up to try to draft like a friendly response and translate it into Chinese.
Right. And as I’m doing it, I get another text from the same number. But this time it’s in English. Oh, no, they just texted me again. And they said, well, what’s the matter with you?
Regina: So much.
Billy: What’s the matter with you?
Adrianne: Gotta make content.
Billy: Yeah, exactly. An insatiable thirst for content. Yeah. So I don’t know, at this point I’m feeling kind of terrible, to be honest, I feel like I realized halfway through harassing this person that I was harassing them. So at this point it was super late and I was feeling kind of bad, like I said, and guilty.
And so I just decided to. Sleep on it. And the next day Ryan sends me a message and he says he has an update. So we jump on a call. I tell him about my experience the night before, and he says something that I was not expecting.
Ryan: I suspect you may have shaken the tree a bit last night.
Billy: Okay.
Ryan: I got an email from them at 2:30 AM our time. So this would have been maybe an hour or two after your whole thing with them. They said, hi, Mr. Ryan Broderick. I am terribly sorry for this issue. The image you mentioned has been deleted to avoid more trouble to you. To express our sincere apologies, we are willing to provide a product in our shop. Anyone, if you feel interested, we’d love to listen if you have other ideas or thoughts.
Billy: Wait, so I’m curious. Okay, so hold on. Sorry. I went into my order history on Amazon and I pulled up the link and it’s no longer you. It’s this other guy.
Regina: Yeah.
Adrianne: But in his original message, didn’t he say, “I’m not mad”?
Billy: Yes. Yeah.
John: Well, I’m also also, wait, did you identify yourself as a journalist or anything on this, on any of the calls?
Billy: No, I never had a chance to.
John: You’re the only American who’s reached out to them since Ryan them.
Adrianne: That cannot be,
Billy: Right. I mean, he identified himself as a journalist.
Adrianne: They just knew. Is there, is there some clue that you’re forgetting that you gave them?
Billy: No. So anyway, they said they had removed the image, so I was like, okay. So what is there now? I just sent it. So this guy, this guy is some like Edward Snowden looking guy. But if you, if you reverse image, search his image, it is everywhere. Like it is all over the place. it’s used in all kinds of fake blog accounts, fake Twitter accounts, fake LinkedIn accounts.
His face is like, I mean, it must be thousands and thousands of uses of his face in what seemed like fraudulent or fake use cases. To me, it seems like it was probably a stock photo. Ryan had been replaced, but here’s the thing. I think it’s very unlikely that CC beauty were the ones. To actually Photoshop him onto the product. I found this same product being sold under different brands with his face on it, including this one, which I’ll link to now under the brand I flash deal.
Regina: Oh, I flash deal. Yeah.
Billy: Yeah. A name often heard around the kitchen table in America.
John: You flash deal? I flash deal.
Regina: We all flash deal.
Billy: So if you click through this one, you will find it. Ryan’s image on it in the same fashion, Photoshopped in the same way. You’ll also find a very disturbing Photoshop of a young woman in the hair bib. Do you see that?
John: Yeah.
Billy: Yeah. That’s the actress Kiernan Shipka, which you may recognize from Mad Men. She’s also on the new Sabrina show on Netflix.
Regina: I couldn’t place her. Yup. That’s her.
Billy: But they’ve done some very weird thing with her face. They’ve like stretched her mouth. It looks like, sort of like Jim, Carrey’s the Grinch. It’s very bizarre. Point is, I don’t know if CC beauty could actually give us the answer we want, because I don’t know if they know it. I think they weren’t the ones to Photoshop this image.
Adrianne: It’s further up the funnel.
Billy: Correct. So that still leaves us with a very important question. How did Ryan’s face end up on the product in the first place? And I think I solved it. So let me take you on a little journey.
John: Is this where like the dreamy harp music would happen.
Billy: Cue Journey music. So you remember that Buzzfeed article?
Regina: Yes.
Billy: Well, one thing Ryan and I both noticed when we tried reverse image searching his image, was that the original article from Buzzfeed had been translated into a bunch of different languages that had been translated into Spanish, into Korean, Japanese, Russian. And of course, Chinese. These are mostly either aggregated rewrites that cite Buzzfeed, or in some cases they just seem to be bootlegged directly and translated from the original text.
And Ryan says that this actually is something that used to happen a lot.
Ryan: It used to happen more often, but there was definitely like a period of time where a lot of internet like Western internet content was being bootlegged. Like in Japan, Korea, China.
Billy: So I started reverse image, searching other faces from that article, just to get a sense of where else the images may have ended up. And one of the other men featured in it. This guy Francis I found on the website, 17QQ.com. And here’s a screenshot of that 17QQ seems to aggregate images and media that Chinese chat users use to communicate.
Adrianne: Right. Or like Facebook.
Billy: Yeah. QQ is owned by Tencent and they now own Wechat, which is the, you know, the dominant form of internet use in China. Like everything happens on Wechat now.
John: So 17QQ, just like aggregates photos that are on QQ?
Billy: Correct. And maybe a Chinese listener will correct me on this, but my understanding is that 17QQ.com is not officially associated with QQ, it just aggregates content from QQ and Wechat and stuff like that.
Regina: Yeah, can I talk about one of the, things on the side, which says, “dry and cracked normal dog meat pad”?
Billy: Yeah. I mean, it might be a translation error, but yeah, there’s lots of, there’s lots of interesting stuff on this website.
Adrianne: Can we just explain overall what this looks like for the listeners?
Billy: Sure, please.
Adrianne: It’s like a very plain webpage, there are a bunch of tags at the top and on the side. And then most of the pages taken up by headshots of people with short captions underneath. And the tags are like, what you would have in a stock photo service, like westerner alone, standing square figure, indoor daytime royalty free stock photos.
Billy: Right. So this is like the kind of bootleg version of stock photography, right? This is just stuff that’s been aggregated and presented as like here, use this stuff. Here’s some keywords, but obviously it’s not taking into account copyright or intellectual property or anything like that. So Ryan isn’t on this particular page, but what’s interesting here is that the image of his coworker from that shoot is in an image collection that translates to foreign face photo.
John: Okay. So his caption on his coworker is, “after foreigners get the plastic surgery program from a Korean plastic surgeon, they are messed up and don’t want to have it.”
Billy: Right. So this was clearly scraped from some translation of the Buzzfeed article and then aggregated into this image collection, which is an image collection of foreigner faces. So I started reading more about 17QQ and they were recently mentioned in a report by Graphika recently in September of 2020, they published a report called Operation Navel Gazing.
“Facebook takes down inauthentic Chinese network.” I’ll link to this here. It’s a PDF. I found this via an article on inputmag.com and a lot of this involves the use of fake profiles. Use for what is called CIB, coordinated, inauthentic behavior. And in the full report, they detail the different ways that these fake accounts from China are generated.
So some of the ways include procuring existing accounts in some fashion and repurposing them. Another way is using AI generated faces, but there is also what they called pilfered profiles. And let me just read part of that section. It’s on page 13. “Other accounts use profile pictures that were taken from a range of online sources, including Instagram shots, posts on Chinese social media platforms, and widely available footage of photo shoots. Two accounts that the operation provided with profile pictures in July 2020 named Anne Purdue and Wendy Bowen used the same photo. An account called Lisa Bella, meanwhile, took its profile picture from an article on the Chinese site. 17QQ.com.”
John: So inauthentic accounts are being the avatars for these inauthentic accounts are sometimes coming from 17QQ.
Billy: Exactly. So it’s not unheard of that images aggregated by 17QQ and up on fake profiles, like Ryan’s has, but that obviously still doesn’t explain the exact pathway for his specific photo. So. I took those keywords that I found on the 17QQ page with his coworker Francis, the one that translated to foreigner face photo, and I started searching different variations of that phrase in Chinese to see what comes up.
And lo and behold, if I do an image search with a Chinese language version of Google, like Google, Hong Kong, this is what I get for foreigner face.
John: Wow.
Adrianne: He’s the third result.
Billy: Exactly
John: And his coworker is the second result.
Billy: Right. His coworker, Laura, who was also Photoshopped with him in the sunglasses earlier they’re, the second and third result. And this is what I get. If I just searched the Chinese word for foreigner.
Adrianne: He’s the number two result.
John: Wow.
Adrianne: He is the second most foreigner.
Billy: Okay. And not only that, but if I do an image search for foreign or face on Baidu, the top search engine in China, these are the results I get.
John: Loading. There he is.
Billy: So he’s not like the second or third result, like on Google, but he’s like, he’s up there. He’s just below the fold of the page, like right when you just scroll down and in most windows, I would say, but I would say within the first handful of results from Baidu, he’s like, you know, he’s one of the, both generic white dudes that looks easy to Photoshop.
John: And he’s on a plain white background. This is easy to cut out. Yeah.
Billy: Yeah.
John: Does, does this, does Baidu give the source of the image?
Billy: Great question. So if you click through to where Baidu is, indexing the image from.
John: Oh yeah.
Billy: It’s our old friend 17QQ.com.
John: Wow.
Regina: Dear old friend. Yes.
John: And let’s, let’s translate this page. Oh, it’s alien head girl, page five.
Billy: Right. So, but yes, that’s what the main title on the page translates to. But what does the text under Ryan translate to?
Adrianne: “These six foreigners asked a Korean plastic surgeon to help them with facial plastic surgery simulation.”
Billy: Right. So right back to the Buzzfeed article. So it stands to reason. I would say that whoever made the Photoshop, as well as whoever made the Photoshops for HD craft or sunglasses and whoever the person was, who seemed to be using his image to sell products related to car tires.
Adrianne: Was not working that hard.
Billy: They’re not working that hard.
It seems like they just wanted a generic face to put on the product for, for a Western market. And they did an image search for something like the word foreigner in Chinese or foreigner face. And basically they just took the first usable looking result for a white dude. So it seems like the pathway here is that Ryan is featured in this Buzzfeed article.
And that article was translated into a bunch of different languages, including Chinese, including by multiple sites that translated it into Chinese and that attached him and his coworkers to key words like foreigner, foreigner face. And now he is basically one of the top search results for those terms in Chinese.
And that resulted in him ending up on all of these products.
And so I presented Ryan with my findings.
Ryan: Basically I am at the top of the Chinese Google search results for foreigner, which is amazing.
Billy: Is that what you expected as a result of this?
Ryan: Well, I feel like there there’s like a certain rule of the internet where the laziest kind of dumbest explanation is almost always the one that’s true because like the internet is a technology run on human laziness and instant gratification. So it’s like, yeah, of course this all started because algorithm put me as the top of a search result for foreigner.
I think it makes total sense.
Billy: So we got our answers, but Ryan wasn’t exactly happy that CC beauty removed his image. And so he sent them some new photos that they
Adrianne: My God.
Billy: -have permission to use. Here are the images he sent me.
John: Oh, my.
Adrianne: These are incredible.
John: Wait, was he really wearing it or no?
Billy: No, no, no, no. He just photo-shopped his head in, in the same fashion, the previous one had been photoshopped. So Ryan has sent CC beauty, these photos. Unfortunately they have not responded. A lot of time has gone by. But as we’ve learned, his face seems to be forever linked with crucial keywords related to foreigners.
And so I think the silver lining here for Ryan, who is bummed that his image has been removed from Amazon is that his face will live on in new ways that didn’t even exist. When I had first started talking to him, I have one other thing to share with you based on what you’re saying. I don’t know if this is good news or bad news.
Ryan: Oh boy. Okay. Yeah. Lay it on me.
Billy: I’m gonna share a link here.
Ryan: It’s an instagram account. It’s called best-selling t-shirts. Oh my God. There I am. Holy shit. Oh my God. There’s so many of me. Oh my God. It’s just like an entire grid of me in various COVID masks. Oh my God. So now it’s just me is like a bunch of different face masks. There’s like a skull one. And a gorilla one and like, like a cool robot one.
And then there’s me even further down with a bunch of like anime themed ones. There’s me with like a death note, one like a cool man. One just like, like, like, like hunky man mask, I guess, under the neck gators story. And it’s just me in various neck gators. Oh my God. There’s more there’s me as the sock puppet mask, me wearing a, like a Heisenberg from breaking bad mask.
There’s so many of me on this. Oh my God. This is insane. Oh, I’m in the story that’s saved.
Adrianne: Thanks for listening under understood is Regina Dellea, John Lagomarsino, Billy Disney and me, Adrianne Jeffries. This episode was reported by Billy, produced by Regina, and mixed and edited by John.
Billy: Also some very exciting news as we’ve teased earlier, we have a Patreon now.
John: And what that means for you the listener is that we have a whole second podcast now, one that’s released every week. We’re calling that podcast Overstood and that feed has all kinds of stuff that you don’t find in the normal under understood episodes. So these are mysteries that we found the answer to too quickly.
These are rabbit holes that we fell down into while researching other stuff. And maybe the most fun thing is episodes of Underunderstood that We began, but couldn’t find the answer to, and that we need your help to solve.
Billy: Exactly. Yeah. This week we have a story. About Beyoncé, which somehow links to dead Abraham Lincoln impersonator named James Getty, and a story about pigeons.
Regina: Patrons also get access to our private Discord server, where we hang out and talk about all kinds of stuff. Underunderstood is produced totally independently and in our spare time. So this kind of direct support will help us sustain the show and take on bigger, more ambitious projects. Not that Beyoncé and pigeons are not ambitious.
Adrianne: You can become a patron for $5 a month and that will get you access to Overstood, our Discord, and maybe some extras in the future.
Billy: We have not announced this officially yet, by the way, until now we’ve teased it. But somehow if you go to patreon.com/underunderstood, there are nine patrons already. So huge shout out to those people.
Adrianne: One of them is my mom.
Billy: Okay, well, so if you want to be a part of it, go to patreon.com/underunderstood. And, you know, we know it’s a weird time to be asking for money, so if you can’t become a patron, that’s totally fine. The main show where we actually solve mysteries, Underunderstood, remains free and unchanged.
Regina: Thank you so much for listening to our show and we’ll be back next week.