Gay men are excellent detectives. The moment Goose entered the conversation, all it took was a blurry Instagram Story, a suspiciously perfect selfie, and three matching emojis for someone to start assembling a conspiracy board before brunch.
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So when a wave of impossibly handsome strangers started inviting people to join Goose, a new invite-only dating app promising something more meaningful than endless hookups, plenty of people simply assumed Goose had stumbled onto a surprisingly clever way to build buzz—and that they’d found an unusually friendly corner of Instagram.
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WIRED wasn’t so convinced.
After digging into the app’s unusual marketing campaign, the publication uncovered what appears to be a coordinated network of newly created Instagram accounts, many of which showed strong signs of using AI-generated profile photos while sending nearly identical invitations to prospective users. Instead of asking whether Goose could replace Grindr, the conversation quickly shifted to a different question altogether: who exactly was doing the inviting?
WIRED started connecting the dots
At first glance, accounts like Miles Sumrall, Daniel Mulugeta, Alistair Crombbie, and Luca Lepkowski looked like fairly typical Instagram gays—good lighting, solid facial hair, vacation photos, and enough thirst traps to suggest they understood the assignment.
There was just one problem.
According to WIRED, the accounts all shared remarkably similar characteristics. Most were created within the same narrow timeframe, featured only a handful of posts, followed unusually large numbers of people, commented on one another’s photos using similar emojis, and delivered nearly identical invitations encouraging users to join Goose.
The publication also ran several profile photos through AI detection tools. Multiple images—including those belonging to Miles and Daniel—were reportedly identified as being highly likely to have been generated using artificial intelligence, while Google’s SynthID found that “most or all of” those profile pictures had been created with Google AI.
Is Goose Building Buzz—or Just Raising More Questions?
That doesn’t automatically prove the accounts were operated by Goose itself. However, taken together, the similarities were enough for WIRED to question whether the campaign was presenting itself as organic community interest when something much more coordinated may have been happening behind the scenes.