The DoorDash Deep Throat scam lays bare our new era of untruthiness

This past weekend, the internet was set ablaze by a post on r/Confessions claiming to be from a software engineer-turned-whistleblower working at a food delivery app. "I'm posting this from a library wi-fi on a burner laptop because I am technically under a massive NDA," wrote the purported Deep Throat. "You guys always suspect the algorithms are rigged against you, but the reality is so much more depressing than the conspiracy theories."

The poster then went on to make a series of claims about the exploitation of both workers and customers at the unnamed company. Delivery drivers, they said, were called "human assets" by project managers working to "squeeze another 0.4% of margin" out of them. They were ranked according to a "desperation score," and had their wages stolen by using "predictive modeling to dynamically lower the base pay." Customers were being scammed by the app's priority-delivery function, which was actually just a "psychological value-add."

The post went viral, racking up 87,000 upvotes on Reddit. Commenters began speculating about which company the clandestine whistleblower was talking about, with many eventually pointing the finger at DoorDash. It was reposted on dozens of subreddits including the page for delivery drivers where hundreds of commenters thanked the whistleblower for confirming what they already felt. A screengrab of the post garnered more than 40 million views on X, where journalists, activists, and even famous actors got in on the action. "A perfect example of the mindless greed that is sucking generosity and kindness from the American psyche," John Cleese wrote.

Eventually, at midnight on Sunday, DoorDash's CEO Tony Xu stepped in to debunk the claims the company referred to Dashers as "human assets," and that it tracked their "desperation score," or didn't make their priority delivery faster. "This is not DoorDash, and I would fire anyone who promoted or tolerated the kind of culture described in this Reddit post," Xu wrote on X.

By Monday, The Verge confirmed skeptics' suspicions: DoorDash Deep Throat was in fact a fraudster. In an attempt to pull a fast one on the internet, the poster had AI-generated an image of an Uber Eats employee badge and a PDF that purported to be a confidential study that would corroborate the redditor's story.

Business Insider's Alex Bitter was also in contact with the poster. In a series of messages on Friday and over the weekend, the person declined to identify themselves, even for Business Insider's verification purposes, or get on the phone to discuss their post. The poster also provided files that had a high likelihood of being AI-generated, according to tools that check text for signs of AI. The person then did not respond to more questions.

So how were so many people duped? For one, the would-be whistleblower's claims were not completely outlandish. DoorDash, for example, has faced litigation for alleged wage theft. The post went viral because it seemed to confirm what we already suspected about the AI that permeates every aspect of our lives, as opaque algorithms do everything from help airlines maximize prices when you book a flight ticket to help landlords jack up the cost of monthly rentals.

"Conspiracy theories are a type of rumor that helps us make sense of the world," says T. Kenny Fountain, an academic who studies how conspiracy theories spread online. "We hear constantly about these algorithms doing these bad things. It makes sense we are attracted to conspiratorial rumors that involve systems that seem impenetrable to us."

A human desperation score doesn't seem all that farfetched when a little more than a decade ago Meta (then known as Facebook) was caught emotionally manipulating people by messing with the kind of news that appeared on our feeds.

"If I had just come across that post I would have believed it," AI researcher Timnit Gebru, who in 2020 blew the whistle on racial biases in Google's large language models, tells me.

Even if the poster is a fabulist, Gebru explains, the claims eerily rhymed with how the gig economy actually operates. This past fall, researchers at the AI accountability nonprofit that Gebru founded, DAIR, released a report on AI surveillance of Amazon delivery drivers. It found that delivery drivers are required to download an app called Mentor that monitors how they drive, ranking them from "Fantastic Plus" to "Poor." But the app doesn't take into account real-world conditions — a police officer forcing you to veer off track because of a temporary blockade or a child following a runaway ball across the road forcing you to abruptly hit the brakes. All of which, the report says, can ding a driver's score and lead to their firing if they fall below an undisclosed threshold. That's just one of the apps Amazon uses to monitor its workers and drive them to such extremes that they have resorted to urinating in their vans rather than taking bathroom breaks that might risk their productivity rating.

An Amazon spokesperson said the report — written by a former Amazon delivery driver, and included six interviews with drivers working for 10 different providers who work for the company — is based on "incomplete data and methods that seem designed to reach conclusions determined from the start." The person added that the company has "a central operations facility that makes adjustments in the app in real time to account for changing conditions, whether they be weather or otherwise." The spokesperson did not respond to my follow-up on what Amazon considered complete data.

Similarly, last year DoorDash settled a $16.65 million algorithmic wage theft lawsuit with the state of New York. The lawsuit accused the company of using tips to lower Dashers' base pay. As part of the settlement, the Attorney General ordered DoorDash to revise its payment practices and offer drivers more transparency about the breakdown of their paychecks, but DoorDash did not have to admit to any wrongdoing.

When asked for comment, a spokesperson for DoorDash directed us to the company's blog post about the Reddit hoax. "Dasher base pay is determined by three factors and three factors alone: time, distance, and desirability of a given offer. That's it," the company wrote. The spokesperson adds that the settlement "is related to an outdated pay model that hasn't been in place at DoorDash for several years."

By now we have become so accustomed to reports of exploitation of gig workers that it is almost quaint to think back to the mid-2000s when Big Tech marketed the gig economy as unshackling workers from the scrutiny of micromanaging bosses while bringing entrepreneurship to the masses.

By some accounts, these extractive practices are essential to the gig economy's viability. In October, a short seller noted that even a 10% increase in Dasher wages "wipes out" the entirety of DoorDash's 2024 EBITDA. Considering this, it's no surprise that last year alone Amazon, Uber, and DoorDash spent a combined $18.2 million on corporate lobbying. They don't need to divert a "Benefit Fee" to union-busting lobbyists when they're already doing that with the billions in revenue they're making off you.

There is also a meta-level irony to a conspiracist using AI to stoke fears about how AI is exploiting us. The barrier to creating misinformation has become far lower while detecting these falsehoods is becoming increasingly difficult.

Ask any college student or professor and they'll tell you that detection software is notoriously bad at picking up where texts were written by AI. The Verge also noted that its attempts to put the original reddit post through AI detection software yielded mixed results.

Even detecting fake images — which once produced visible watermarks and quirky signatures (too many fingers or weirdly moving mouths) — has become near impossible to detect since November when Google released Nano Banana Pro and allowed virtually anybody to create perfect-looking AI generated images.

And yet fabricating evidence through those very AI tools is what led reporters to catch the conspiracist. In response to reporters' requests to back up the claims, the redditor sent a seemingly real ID from Uber Eats with their identifying information blacked out alongside another official-looking report, marked "confidential," that purported to corroborate the information in the reddit post. They were caught when Google's AI detection software marked the Uber Eats ID as generated by Google's latest image-generation AI. (Uber also confirmed that the card didn't match the actual IDs used by the company.)

But Google's detection software can only tell if an image was generated by the company's AI. Had the faker used another image-generation tool, or been slightly more precise with how they prompted it, they may have gotten away with it. As one of the journalists that debunked the claims, Casey Newton, writes, "I'd love to tell you that, having had this experience, I'll be less likely to fall for a similar ruse in the future. The truth is that, given how quickly AI systems are improving, I'm becoming more worried."

I'm more optimistic about the DoorDash dustup. First, the post's virality proves that we aren't all too jaded to be unmoved by the accounts of exploitation that have become essential to how our modern economy functions. On the other hand, even with the most sophisticated AI fabrication software available today, the anticipated information apocalypse seems to have been successfully staved off.

One major consequence of AI making it much easier to create and disseminate misinformation is that the actual work of truth-seeking is evermore valuable. That is not to disregard the crisis of trust in the news industry. As publications' revenue from social media companies all but evaporates, newsroom leaders would do well to reckon with how the engagement-bait era of the 2010s eroded peoples' trust in our work. Trading the slow and meticulous work of rigorous fact-checking in favor of pushing quick content for likes and retweets will not be a sustainable business practice in an era of sophisticated dupes and falsehoods. DoorDash Deep Throat is the latest case study for why.

We might never know why this redditor spent the weekend hatching an elaborate plan to fool the internet. But if the information environment of the foreseeable future is flooded with viral hoaxes, or if the ubiquity of such misinformation gives powerful figures the ability to cry fake news when faced with authentic leaks, the institutions that strive to foster the public's trust have the most to gain.

Additional reporting by Alex Bitter.

Tekendra Parmar is a former features editor at Business Insider. He has also worked at Rest of World, Time, Fortune, Harper's Magazine, and The Nation.

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