The influencer lawsuit that could change the industry

Alyssa Sheil has what some would consider a dream job: she shops online for a living. Every day, an Amazon delivery truck pulls up to her home to drop off jewelry, handbags, desk chairs, fake plants, and transparent birdhouses that allow you to see the inhabitants make a home inside. So many packages arrive in a week that she doesn’t know the exact number when I ask.

Some of these items suck. The ones that don’t might eventually make it into one of Sheil’s videos, shared to her more than 430,000 followers on TikTok and Instagram with titles like “Amazon summer shoe haul,” “ASMR Amazon vacay jewelry unboxing,” and “Amazon kitchen finds I’m obsessed with.” 

Sheil’s own Amazon purchases don’t so much decorate her home as they do serve as a set for her online content. When I visit her house in a quiet, clean subdivision outside of Austin, Texas, the first thing I notice is the avalanche of beige and neutrals. Everything around me — the rugs, the art, the books on the shelves — are shades of white, black, or cream. Dainty gold bracelets and necklaces hang undisturbed off an ecru display rack. Fuzzy benches and chairs in shades of eggshell and oyster seem like they have never been sat on. Sheil shows me a round birch-colored side table that I recognize from countless videos of hers. The table and cream chair next to it are surrounded by cool bare white walls, everything bathed in soft natural light filtered through semi-sheer snow-colored curtains. After a few minutes of walking through her home, it starts to feel like I’m browsing paint chips at Lowe’s: Extra White, Grecian Ivory, Shiitake, White Heron. She likes it this way.

“It’s definitely very calming,” Sheil, 21, says of her decor. “Growing up, my parents had a bunch of pictures on the walls, they had rooms that had different colors… So when we moved into this place, I was like, ‘I don’t want a bunch of stuff on the walls. I don’t want mismatched things. I just want it to all be cohesive and plain.’” It is not just Sheil who prefers her space to be colorless — a generation of women dream in beige and cream.

Sheil runs what is essentially a one-woman marketing operation, making product recommendations, trying on outfits, and convincing people to buy things they often don’t really need. Every time someone purchases something using her affiliate link, she gets a kickback. Shopping influencers like her have figured out how to build a career off someone else’s impulse buys.

She demonstrates how she might record a video showing off a pair of white mesh kitten heels: attach a phone to a tripod and angle the camera toward a corner in her home office where there is nothing in the background, just a blank wall and part of a chair. The shoes pop against the nothingness, new and clean and buyable. To show off an outfit, Sheil drags a full-length mirror in front of her and snaps into a pose; she is — quite literally — a pro. 

The only item in her home not from Amazon is an all-white canvas poster handmade by Sheil that hangs above her work desk. In big block letters, it reads, “I AM SO LUCKY.” Perched beneath this mantra, Sheil plugs away at her computer searching for Amazon products that fit her colorless world. 

But all of this — the videos, the big house, her earnings — could come crashing down: Sheil is currently embroiled in a court case centered on the very content that is her livelihood, a Texas lawsuit in which she is being sued for damages that could reach into the millions.

It has been stressful and confusing to navigate lawyers, having to defend herself against accusations lodged at her by another Amazon influencer: copyright infringement, tortious interference with prospective business relations, misappropriating another person’s likeness, among other accusations. Even with the lawsuit looming over her, Sheil is still confident that the industry is ripe with opportunity, that beneath all these ivory stools and black paintings is a gold rush. 

“I do think that there’s space and definitely enough money for everyone that’s in [the Amazon influencer] program,” she tells me as we sit on her cream sofa. After all, Sheil’s aesthetic is spare, bland, or, if you wanted to be ungenerous, you could call it basic. It’s a look and feel so commonplace on the internet that I can’t imagine anyone claiming ownership over it, especially in a legal context.

The next day, I fly to meet with Sydney Nicole Gifford, 24, the Amazon influencer that is suing Sheil, at her home outside of Minneapolis.

Gifford and her mother, Laura, greet me at the door. They are enthusiastic and inviting. Stepping inside, I am overwhelmed by a familiar palette: alarmingly neutral, not a single speck of color in sight. The house is still and silent, a vessel for content creation. In other words, it’s like I never left Sheil’s house — someone just shuffled the pieces around and plopped me onto a different set.

Laura Gifford is closely involved in her daughter’s business — she works as her manager, handling email communications, booking travel, and more. 

Gifford and her mother are clearly close, and Laura has watched as her daughter has lived out years of her life online. At 12, she was making stop-motion videos and uploading them to YouTube, Laura tells me, and then her platform as an influencer took off four or five years ago.

Gifford seems relaxed as we talk in her airy, spacious home filled to the brim with Amazon products.

“I think I feel more calm in neutral spaces,” Gifford says, echoing what Sheil told me the day before. “Now my favorite color is beige.” She’ll sometimes hashtag her social media content with #sadbeigehome, she adds, laughing. “It is a sad beige home, and I like it.”

I have no malice toward the Sad Beige Home, but I, personally, am thrilled I do not live here. Despite the light pouring in from the oversize windows and the electric fireplace glowing in the living room, it feels cold, austere, not suited for life. It reminds me of staying at an Airbnb, with the charms of lived-in coziness — cute window shutters, lots of throw pillows, the setting sun casting gold rays into the kitchen — but where every drawer is empty and bath towels still have price stickers on the inside. Gifford has only lived here a few months, so not everything is set up yet, but the black, white, and cream foundations of the home are settled.

This aggressively neutral aesthetic is wildly popular — it’s so ubiquitous online that I might be the weird one for not liking it. This minimalism is also aspirational; millions of people have seen Gifford’s and Sheil’s videos, and thousands have likely purchased products from their affiliate links. What I was not prepared for, even after watching hours of their content online, was that it wasn’t just their social media profiles that were monochrome: their lives and their homes are exactly the same. It’s like you grabbed the corners of your phone screen and expanded a TikTok video out into a world of neutrals.

Ironically, there is color at Gifford’s home today, albeit temporarily. On the afternoon I visit, she is filming content for an upcoming video on her favorite fall decor items. She pulls out a cardboard box of autumnal products, some of which are new and some of which are from the year before: a soft orange throw blanket, pillows, and miniature stuffed pumpkins. If a product is no longer sold on Amazon, there is no reason to feature it in a video — people watching will just ask where it’s from, and Gifford will have nowhere to send them to (and no way to make money on the item). Gifford orders a lot of stuff, and unsurprisingly, a fair portion of products are “not up to par,” she says. In her office, she has a white drawer filled with flops that she will return to Amazon.

Gifford knows, from experience, the exact angles she must capture to sell the items she features in videos: a slow, top-down panning shot of her coffee table; a few seconds of her stepping into the corner of the frame and placing cream ceramic pumpkins on her fireplace mantel. Laura acts as a second set of eyes, standing behind the iPhone on a tripod and telling her daughter whether she’s in frame or whether anything in the shot looks off. Gifford darts around her home, grabbing brief clips that she will later splice together in the choppy, rapid-fire editing style that has become instantly recognizable as “shortform video.” She can tell immediately if her disembodied hand plopped a mini plush pumpkin slightly awkwardly. The camera keeps rolling as she picks it up and does the motion again.

In her lawsuit, Gifford alleges that Sheil copied her, down to specific frames in videos. She claims that repeated pattern and Sheil’s uncannily similar content ultimately cut into Gifford’s own earnings. The similarities extend, in Gifford’s telling, beyond just video content to eerie real-life aspects like her manner of speaking, appearance, and even tattoos. 

Walking through the space, I can’t help but recognize a few furniture items that I also saw in Sheil’s home, which I had visited the day before: cream bouclé stools that double as storage; a curved full-length mirror propped up in the corner; a set of circular nesting tables that appear often in both her and Sheil’s videos. 

In another world, these two parallel lives could go on indefinitely, accented by the same cream furniture, without crossing paths. But the same systems that make the careers of Sheil and Gifford possible — fine-tuned recommendation algorithms, affiliate marketing, fast fashion and cheap home goods — are now entangling them in a legal battle around ownership, style, and the creator industry. 

So, who influenced whom?

Sheil and Gifford aren’t simply two strangers with similar taste. They have a short but relevant history together, as described in court documents and interviews.

In late 2022 and early 2023, when they both lived in Austin, they hung out together in person twice. The meetups were casual, perhaps akin to an outing for networking: both say the goal was “supporting” each other’s business. The first time, in December 2022, the two women — along with a third influencer friend of Gifford’s — met in person, at a shopping mall in Austin.

“It was fine, nothing too crazy,” Sheil says. “I was a little nervous to go into it, just because it was her and a friend that she already had. And I was kind of like the outsider, in a sense. I’d never met either of these girls before.” Sheil’s attorneys write in their reply to the suit that, on this first day out, Gifford “began quizzing Sheil on Sheil’s strategies and techniques” and made “passive aggressive” comments about her young age. They allege that after that day, Gifford’s content started looking more like Sheil’s, a claim Gifford says is “meritless.”

Still, the outing went well enough that the group of three met for a second time in early 2023 — this time at a parking garage in the area, with the intention of taking photos together. Accounts differ on how this second outing went, according to interviews and court documents. Sheil says she felt “excluded” by the other women and left the meetup with a bad taste in her mouth.

“I wasn’t spoken to for the first hour of getting there. There were little things here and there where I was just kind of made to feel unwelcome,” she says.

Gifford and the other influencer say they both left the outings with the impression that things had gone well. The third influencer — whose name is redacted in court filings — writes in an affidavit that there was nothing “rude” about the group’s interactions.

“We had what I seemed to think was a great, professional, friendly relationship,” Gifford says. “So it was blindsiding to have all of this happen, and then even more blindsiding for her to go and make these huge claims all over the place about bullying and harassment,” Gifford says, responding to Sheil’s claims in her response to the lawsuit. 

Regardless of what happened at the outings, everyone agrees on what happened next: Sheil blocked Gifford on social media.

“I didn’t really feel a need to keep up a relationship via social media when it wasn’t that great in real life,” Sheil says.

Gifford took no offense — despite its glamorous sheen, the influencer industry can wreak havoc on creators’ mental health if they spend hours a day comparing themselves to other people. So she carried on, unfazed, for 10 months. But then she started hearing from followers that Sheil’s content had begun to closely resemble hers.

“It was brought to my attention by someone who saw [Sheil’s] post on their For You page, thought that it was my post, and then saw that the account name wasn’t my name,” Gifford says. She heard of apparent confusion from “numerous” followers, she says, and then noticed how similar their posts were: the videos and photos didn’t just have the same vibe but also promoted the same Amazon products, according to Gifford’s lawsuit. Gifford also says Sheil had changed her appearance in some ways, like coloring her hair and wearing it in a different style. Gifford hired an attorney, began sending cease and desist orders to Sheil, and registered her social media posts with the US Copyright Office — an unusual step not taken by most influencers.

“Once I got [the cease and desist], I was just so upset. I was crying, I was shocked,” Sheil says. “I was very confused, because [Gifford’s] name hadn’t even come into my mind since I blocked her.”

Sheil and Gifford are but two among the many influencers making money through Amazon’s program, but their case could have paradigm-shifting consequences for everyone else. Gifford is suing Sheil for a litany of offenses, stemming from what she sees as the two women’s strikingly similar videos and photos on social media. The case has potentially wide-reaching implications for influencers and creators, but it stems from a familiar, even ordinary, complaint: Gifford says Sheil won’t stop copying her.

In a complaint filed in the Western District of Texas this spring, Gifford accuses Sheil of “willful, intentional, and purposeful” copyright infringement in dozens of posts across platforms like TikTok and Instagram. Gifford says there’s been a pattern of copying: days or weeks after she would share photos or videos promoting an Amazon product, Sheil shared her own content doing the same thing. In dozens of cases, Gifford says the angle, tone, or the text on Sheil’s posts ripped off hers. Exhibits submitted in court include nearly 70 pages of side-by-side screenshots collected by Gifford comparing her social media posts, personal website, and other platforms where she says Sheil copied her. In one instance, Gifford promoted gold earrings in the shape of a bow, modeling them by gently swooping her hair back to show them off. Just a few days later, Sheil posted her own photos of the same earrings, similarly photographed. In another example submitted to the court, Gifford unboxes and tries on a white two-piece top and short set; a few weeks later, Sheil did the same. The pattern continued for around a year, Gifford alleges.

“It’s obviously very frustrating because I put a lot of time and effort into my business. I work very hard at what I do, and I love what I do,” Gifford says. “It felt like somebody took a piece of my business and is profiting off of it as their own.”

Despite how inescapably ubiquitous the influencer industry has become, there are relatively few norms and laws governing creators. What regulations do exist are poorly enforced. The rates that influencers command vary widely; creators, especially those with smaller followings, are left to their own devices as they negotiate with enormous corporations. Efforts at collective action or unionizing have mostly fallen flat. Laws around sponsored content and copyright exist, but creators bend or even ignore rules regularly. And although influencers are — naturally — influential, there remains a pervasive cultural stigma around their labor: influencers are seen as vapid, and their jobs are considered easy. The upshot is that the general public often has little sympathy for this group of workers, even though they are often exploited, and so they remain unprotected. When things go wrong for an influencer, it is risky to direct blame toward the corporations they cut deals with and close to impossible to direct it toward the audiences that rationalize their entire existence. Influencers may turn on other influencers not so much out of a desire for attention as it is a direct result of the material conditions under which they work. A case like the one between Gifford and Sheil, in other words, was a long time coming.

According to data that Gifford has compiled, and a chart tracking earnings that she shared with me, as Sheil posted more and more similar content, Gifford’s commissions took a hit: months that were historically her biggest earners made much less, up to “a little less than half” of what she ordinarily could expect. 

Gifford’s suit includes a wide range of charges beyond copyright infringement. She also accuses Sheil of the misappropriation of her likeness — that is, changing her appearance to look more like Gifford — and profiting from it. Gifford also says Sheil replicated her content style that has come to be associated with her brand and public image.

“I think there aren’t enough clear boundaries in the influencer industry, and unfortunately, a lot of people don’t treat this as a business,” Gifford says. “Which is why I’m having to file a lawsuit to protect my work and my brand.”

Sheil denies she copied Gifford, whether that’s specific videos and products, her appearance, her content style, or her digital presence across different sites. “[Gifford’s] ‘look’ is not original,” Sheil’s attorneys write in a response filed to the court. “For that matter, on that front, neither is Sheil’s.”

Her response to Gifford’s suit opens with a quote attributed to Kim Kardashian, though its origin seems dubious: “People only rain on your parade because they’re jealous of your sun and tired of their shade.” It was Gifford that did the copying, Sheil alleges — not her.

Sheil and Gifford have a similar online persona and aesthetic, apart from just the neutral, minimal houses. They both have long, shiny hair that’s often set in gentle curls or slicked back into a bun. They opt for uncomplicated clothing like fitted tank tops and T-shirts, oversize sweat suits, and chunky off-white sneakers, paired with gold-toned rings, necklaces, and earrings. Their makeup is fresh and glowy, their nails are perfectly manicured, and they make fancy-looking drinks in their spotless white kitchens. 

They are what the internet calls “clean girls.”

The “clean girl” is an image, a vibe, a genre — one that promotes self-care, comfort, and looking put-together. The most famous clean girl is perhaps Hailey Bieber, and there are countless explainers, tutorials, think pieces, and critiques of the trending aesthetic online. (There is a fairly obvious slippery slope when you categorize people as pure or virtuous based on how they look — especially when components of the look were originally established in non-white communities.) Minimal makeup and smooth hair alone are not enough to be a clean girl — clean girls have perfect white bedsheets, tidy homes with natural light, and of course, spend a lot of time bathing. Sheil’s and Gifford’s content does not align exactly with all of these tropes of the genre, but it is undeniably appealing to the same audience. Their homes, physical appearance, and implied lifestyle are meant to be aspirational.

Where other young women might watch Gifford’s and Sheil’s videos and dream of a similar home for themselves, Sheil’s invocation of Kardashian is apt: the two women owe a great deal of their look and online persona to the person many consider to be the first true influencer. (“You see why they call me Kris 2.0 at all the events?” Gifford’s mother, Laura, quips at one point while she instructs her daughter to adjust her hair as we snap photos. That’s Kris, as in Kris Jenner, the Kardashian matriarch, of course.)

Rewatching Kim Kardashian’s multiple home tour videos, the most recent of which is from 2022, it’s clear just how influential she’s been for generations of women. Her home, like Gifford’s and Sheil’s, is completely monochromatic in beige and cream. In her tours, she’s wearing neutral clothing that matches the decor. A bouclé armchair that Gifford has in her home appears to be a copy of a similar chair that’s featured prominently in Kardashian’s tour. Kardashian speaks of a minimal, quiet home that makes her feel calm — I’ve heard that more than once before.

Amazon influencers like Gifford and Sheil don’t make content just to inspire people. They post on TikTok and Instagram to redirect audiences back to Amazon. In some ways, it is the most ruthless version of influencer marketing, where every item appearing onscreen is an opportunity for micro-earnings. Amazon declined to provide data on the number of people in its influencer program or how much money the company has paid out. That the company ultimately profiting from the sale is one of the largest retailers in the world makes the whole enterprise a bit off-putting — an empire built on fast, largely low-quality products that look great in photos but come from faceless companies that manufacture mountains of crap, much of which will eventually end up in a landfill. These are not vintage Jean Royère wool armchairs (which sold for $460,000 at auction, according to Christie’s); they are $800 decent-looking dupes that give the impression of luxury. If the argument is that Sheil is duplicating Gifford’s existence, there’s something to be said about the fact that the items both of them promote are also imitations of someone else’s work.

Every post is shoppable, subtly nudging viewers via captions like “All items linked in my amzn sf!” — algo-speak for “Amazon storefront” to evade content filters.

The storefront is a customizable landing page on Amazon where influencers can collect and organize all the products they buy and recommend, sorting them into categories like home decor or beauty. When shoppers navigate to product pages from these links and make a purchase, the influencer gets a cut of the sales. It is a zero-sum game: if you buy pots and pans from one storefront, you (probably) won’t buy the same product again from someone else’s.

Here, too, Gifford accuses Sheil of copying her. During the Cyber Monday sales event in 2023, Gifford claims Sheil listed “a substantial number of the exact products” on her storefront shortly after she did, including a four-piece bowl set and checkerboard throw blanket. On Amazon itself, Gifford says Sheil posted photos modeling a knit sweater set a few days after her — striking a similar pose and promoting the same product, according to exhibits filed in her complaint.

“Searching for new products on Amazon takes a long time. I personally choose every product. I purchase every product myself from Amazon, and I only create content around products that are authentic to my brand,” Gifford says. “So it’s not a coincidence when another creator reviews the same products in the same style after I do it.”

But Sheil says this misrepresents how Amazon influencers operate: many of the products influencers feature in content are pushed at them by Amazon itself. Around sales events like Prime Day or Black Friday, creators receive giant spreadsheets of hundreds of thousands of items that will be on sale that influencers are encouraged to promote — it only makes sense that two people with a similar niche would feature the same products. One of the posts Gifford says Sheil copied shows a cream-colored cable knit sweater and short set, but this item was in one of these Amazon-promoted spreadsheets, Sheil claims. 

Amazon also shares more curated information like lists of trending keywords and specific products that fall into categories like beauty products or fashion. In addition, there’s an influencer hub that tells affiliate partners trending searches (“fall dresses” or “headphones for school,” for example) along with related products to promote. Featured items end up in affiliate content through various avenues, not just the individual influencer scrolling through thousands of pages of listings.

“A lot of it is from these spreadsheets, and then the rest of it is either found by me or the brands are reaching out asking me to promote it,” Sheil says. Brands sometimes send products unsolicited, hoping Sheil will make a video about it. 

Gifford maintains that she handpicked all of the items named in her suit and that she didn’t rely on Amazon-issued lists around sale periods to find the items she says Sheil copied from her.

“They were purchased sporadically throughout the year because I chose them. So it just doesn’t make sense,” Gifford says.

It’s plausible, in theory, that Sheil and Gifford just happened to select similar items to review and promote on social media, especially with Amazon’s guiding hand. But when presented side by side, one can’t help but notice the overlap.

Still, even with similar or nearly identical posts, it’s unclear whether Sheil actually infringed on Gifford’s intellectual property — Sheil didn’t repost any of Gifford’s actual images or videos. The posts just feature the same products, in similar settings.

“I can see how this is incredibly infuriating and frustrating, but also really hard to combat, because most of what an influencer is doing in terms of content creation is not protectable,” says Alexandra Roberts, professor of law and media at Northeastern University. “You still need to get really close to [the original image or video] to actually infringe it. And when I say really close, I mean, basically indistinguishable [or] identical, because the protection is thin for something like a picture of a doormat in front of a store and somebody’s foot is a little bit in it.” Roberts says that, for the most part, the copyright claims feel like “a huge reach.”

If Gifford’s legal argument is successful, it could mean any influencer making content in an established genre could be liable — even though, in general, copyright law limits liability for use of genre tropes. 

“I hope that it changes how people make content,” Gifford says. “I hope that it makes people more mindful, because there are so many instances of other creators I’ve seen getting their content completely replicated by people. This is not the first time that this has happened, and that’s why we’re here.”

But she has an uphill battle in proving there is something in her work that she has legal ownership over in the first place. Sometimes, you can be so basic that copyright law doesn’t even protect you.

“The really hard part for the plaintiffs in this case is to prove that in these photos and videos there is something protectable by copyright — that there is creativity going on here that was copied,” says Blake Reid, associate professor of law at the University of Colorado Boulder. The photos in question are relatively banal: images of a figure wearing generic clothing; a shot of a desk with a chair tucked in halfway. Sheil’s lawyers argue that the imagery Gifford claims was ripped off is actually just standard fare for influencer content that reappears again and again and which nobody can lay claim to — it’s the Amazon haul equivalent of swinging saloon doors in a country Western film, Reid explains.

And because the images are not exact replicas, you have to look instead at how a creative idea was expressed and executed: what angle the photographer used; how they staged the image; and all the other “gory details” of creative choices.

In 1984, Co Rentmeester photographed Michael Jordan leaping midair toward the basket with a ball in his left hand. His legs are nearly in a split as he flies toward the net. It’s a familiar image for most of us — not because we’ve seen Rentmeester’s original photograph but because Nike used a similar silhouette of the athlete as the logo for Air Jordan products. The silhouette in the logo is not from Rentmeester’s image but from a separate, later photo that Nike created where Jordan is again leaping toward the basket. His legs are outstretched but perfectly straight and at more of an angle, and his right arm points down sharply. Behind him is the Chicago skyline at dusk. Rentmeester sued Nike in 2015.

“It’s judges playing art critic,” Reid says. “What is the creative significance of all of these different aspects of the photograph?” Nike prevailed over Rentmeester in the case, with a court finding that the images weren’t substantially similar — the photographer didn’t own Jordan’s pose, and only creative choices like the angle of the photographs and camera shutter speed could be protected.

Reid says the outcome of Gifford’s lawsuit will depend on whether a judge or jury takes influencer content seriously as a creative endeavor. On one hand, it could be framed as “low-value commercial content” that all looks the same, in which case Gifford’s lawsuit could be seen as an attempt to lay claim to a template of mass-produced marketing — something that copyright law isn’t really for. But a judge might see influencer content as having enough creative weight to merit bringing copyright law into the picture.

“It depends a lot on what judge lands this, how they perceive it, [and] how it gets framed in the litigation,” he says. 

“This is federal law with giant amounts of money on the line, coming in and regulating these nascent creative spaces where the rules and the social norms are just getting hashed out,” Reid says. “And then somebody’s like, ‘How about we bring this giant sledgehammer of copyright law in to sort it all out?’”

What Gifford says is theft feels like unequal scrutiny to Sheil. Neither woman created the neutral, monochromatic look, nor were they the first to take a photo of cellphone cases arranged against a white background.

“There are hundreds of people with the exact same aesthetic, and I’m the only one that’s having to go through this,” Sheil says, her voice breaking. “It’s coming across very gatekeep-y… Like, ‘I’m the only one that’s allowed to be successful in this program, I’m the only one that’s allowed to put my foot in the door.’”

Complicating matters is the fact that Gifford, who identifies as a white Hispanic woman, is suing Sheil, a Black Latina woman, for misappropriation — the unauthorized use of a person’s likeness. Gifford says that Sheil “imitated outfits, poses, hairstyles, makeup, and the manner of speaking” to produce “a virtually indistinguishable replica of [Gifford’s] likeness.” Gifford also says that Sheil got the same tattoo in the same place as her — a flower on the left bicep. Asked about her tattoo that closely resembles Gifford’s, Sheil says the dainty image of a bouquet of flowers represents her family members. She says she got the idea for her tattoo from browsing content on Pinterest and that the resemblance to Gifford’s is a coincidence, plain and simple.

Older social media posts show Sheil often wore her hair curly in the past but at one point dyed her hair a similar shade to Gifford’s a few months after Gifford changed her hair color. Gifford argues that when the two women took mirror selfies with their phones covering their faces, “it absolutely looked like a very similar person,” despite them being different races.

But it’s impossible to ignore the optics of a lawsuit in which a Black Latina woman is accused of looking and acting too much like a white counterpart — to put it bluntly, in pop culture, it is usually the other way around. Apart from ensnaring her in a monthslong legal mess, the misappropriation claim dredges up larger questions around the digital and social spaces that creators of color, and especially Black creators, must navigate. 

Influencing, especially when it comes to the clean girl aesthetic, says Sheil, “is a predominantly white industry.” 

When I interview her in person, it’s clear the topic has struck a nerve. She is visibly upset. “As a person of color who is on the fairer side, I feel like I’ve never really fit in with the darker crowds or the lighter crowds,” says Sheil. “I’m too dark for the lighter crowds and then too light for the darker crowds. So it’s just a weird spot to be in.”

Gifford’s original complaint doesn’t mention the racial identities of either party, though Sheil’s answer filed to the court does. Responding to the misappropriation claim, Sheil’s attorneys write, “It is difficult to fathom how someone could confuse Sheil (a Black-Latina woman) with a white woman.” Elsewhere, Sheil’s attorneys write that Gifford has “a predominantly white audience” — information that Gifford says Sheil would have no way of knowing, because even Gifford doesn’t have access to data on the racial identities of her audience.

“I never brought race into this, and the fact that [Sheil’s side] did … honestly disgusts me, because that is such an important topic, especially today,” Gifford told me. Gifford’s own family background includes roots in Spain and Puerto Rico. “That is also offensive to me, that you’re saying I’m just a white girl. You don’t know my background and my history.”

Sheil’s and Gifford’s appearances have diverged since the timeframe captured in the initial filings in the lawsuit. At the time we meet, Gifford has dark, slinky hair that cascades down her back, and Sheil has shorter hair with blonde highlights, often wrapped in gentle curls.

“Obviously she can do whatever she wants with her hair. It looks great. It looks awesome,” Gifford says of Sheil. “We [currently] look nothing alike, and she’s rocking the hairstyle. It looks great on her.” There seems to be an edge to her delivery, and I can’t quite tell if it’s coming from frustration or relief.

Without any facial features visible, it’s conceivable that social media audiences might mix the two women up. I do a reverse image search for one of the cited examples, in which Gifford and Sheil are wearing baggy gray sweatshirt and short sets, their iPhones blocking their faces. If I were someone who followed a smattering of influencers who had similar shticks, I probably would have a hard time telling anyone apart. I don’t know that that is a bug — more than it is a feature — of having a job that is mediated by an algorithm.

In Kyle Chayka’s 2024 book, Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture, he writes about Nigel Kabvina, a TikToker who blew up on the platform during the covid-19 pandemic. Kabvina iterated on his content based on the feedback the platform spat back at him: he avoided talking and adding text so his videos could transcend language, for example, and optimized his content based on when engagement data showed that viewers scrolled away. He meticulously built his virality as much as he stumbled into it.

“For independent creators, the algorithm takes the place of bosses and performance reviews,” Chayka writes. “It’s a real-time authority gauging your success at adapting to its definition of compelling content, which is always shifting.” This in part feeds into a sameness that permeates not just our feeds but real, tangible spaces, too.

Kabvina’s process of trial, error, and adjustment is part and parcel of the job of influencer — there is probably no other occupation where you are forced to know what other people think of you at this frequency and intensity. The platforms themselves are fierce enforcers of norms and standards, throwing fuel on advertiser-friendly trends while limiting the reach of content deemed “ineligible for recommendation.” It’s in this bubble that content creators are developing their style and image, and overlap is bound to happen. 

K., a lifestyle influencer who makes part of her income via Amazon sales, says she regularly comes across other people who make remarkably similar content to her. “Unless you’re an alien, you’re going to have that experience,” she says. (K. is not involved in the lawsuit between Sheil and Gifford and requested anonymity in order to speak freely about her experience in the Amazon program.)

“[As a creator] you want to feel like you have unique value that you’re giving out into this world, and you want to be appreciated and respected and compensated for your unique content, energy, value, [and] personality,” K. says. But there’s a process of refining videos that naturally occurs as a creator builds a following. 

“You start off throwing so many ideas at the wall — just like, ‘I like this, I like this, I like this, I like this,’” K. says. “And then as you go your path sort of narrows and narrows … and you kind of middle yourself out.” For certain types of content niches, there’s a convergence that happens, K. says. Things do start to look the same.

Social platforms driven by trends, memes, and viral sound bites accelerate this homogeneity. Instagram, for example, allows Reels creators to straight-up copy and paste editing choices like sound, text, or jump cuts from one user’s video to another, using a feature called Templates. On TikTok, creators can search for trending hashtags and topics and specifically tailor their videos to what people are searching for — a type of SEO for the shortform video world. If one person reviews “the viral Amazon office chair,” it’s only natural that others will follow suit. How much of the overlap between Gifford and Sheil is simply the system working as intended?

“I really strive to pick products that are unique,” Gifford says. “And while some products, of course, are going to be viral and multiple people are going to review them, the beauty of social media is typically when someone reviews a product, you can see that creator’s unique style.”

But there is a tremendous amount of repetitiveness when it comes to which Amazon products influencers decide to post about. For one, Amazon itself has a firehose of recommendations it directs to creators — K. says she gets weekly emails from the company with “personalized” recommendations for products she should consider featuring, along with regular automated Instagram DMs with links to products. There is also the obvious fact that the influencers themselves are discerning shoppers: if they’re scrolling through Amazon for a pink headphone case, they’re probably going to pick something that already has good reviews.

“When it comes to most products on Amazon, there is a clear winner,” K. says. “There is the Amazon choice, there is the bestseller, there is the five-star product with 50,000 reviews, versus the 4.5 with 5,000 reviews. You’re always going to go for something within the top three links.”

Many of the images that Gifford filed to the court as examples of Sheil’s unlawful copying are what many would consider standard shots of this kind of content. And some videos presented side by side may seem the same when looking at just one frame but actually have very little in common when played all the way through. A few moments of looking similar doesn’t necessarily mean there is deliberate replication happening — just that this is what creators, viewers, and advertisers have come to expect out of influencer content.

“Basically everyone in the [Amazon] program does [unboxing videos],” Sheil says. “They unbox something on a bed, they then try it on in a mirror, and then that’s the entirety of the video. If you search Amazon right now, you would probably find hundreds of those videos.”

Amazon has stayed out of the legal spat between Sheil and Gifford, but the company does have some vague rules for content creators promoting its products. Its guidelines for influencer content that is uploaded directly to the marketplace warns, “Do NOT plagiarize content in any way … While you may draw inspiration from existing sources, directly copying or minimally altering someone else’s material is unacceptable.” 

Amazon declined to comment on the lawsuit between Sheil and Gifford.

Gifford v. Sheil is not the first time an influencer has accused another of copying them — copyright itself is frequently weaponized in inter-creator conflicts through the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) notice-and-takedown regime. Gifford’s suit, which takes the battle out of the realm of platform-level DMCA adjudication and into a federal district court, significantly raises the stakes. Perhaps the suit will serve as a serious warning shot to other influencers, but it mostly strikes me as a last-ditch effort by someone who has exhausted her other (few) options.

Content creators are gig workers with a fancier job description, operating like an army of freelance one-person marketing firms, navigating an industry where just about anything goes. When there are disputes — and there often are — it’s the individual influencers who are left holding the bag, even if they’re not the ones actually producing and selling the products, managing content creators, or hosting the storefronts. It doesn’t matter if it’s Sheil or Gifford who convinces you to buy the throw pillow; Amazon gets paid either way.

Whether Sheil, in fact, carefully imitated Gifford’s posts as a way to siphon off some of her sales is an open question — the answer is likely unknowable without combing through Sheil’s browsing history on TikTok, Instagram, and Amazon. In November, a judge ruled that Gifford’s case could proceed, including some claims that Sheil’s attorneys had moved to dismiss, like the argument that Sheil is liable for vicarious copyright infringement because her followers had access to content that was allegedly copied.

Gifford says her earnings have mostly gone back to normal, which she attributes to Sheil making fewer videos that look like hers, but Gifford has changed how she films videos in an effort to have her content be more clearly identifiable as her own. She’s stopped filming unboxings on a set of circular tables similar to those that appear often in Sheil’s clips, and she says she’s started including her face in videos more to differentiate herself.

“I’m going to try and make the black couch a thing,” Gifford says as she arranges a selection of pumpkin decorations in her living room. “Hopefully that becomes identifiable as my couch.” It’s a sentence that would sound absurd on its own, but this is the minutiae that can preoccupy the minds of influencers — especially if they live in a constant state of unease, worrying someone else will copy their life. The fierce competition of this industry means you can’t be normal about your living room furniture.  

Gifford is about to embark on a new era in life and online content. She goes by Sydney Nicole Slone on social media now, after recently getting married, and she is expecting a baby boy. (The nursery will break with her neutral aesthetic and will have a blue theme, she tells me.) Gifford’s black and white living room is all over her videos, and the comments are filled with strangers asking where she got every possible item in her house. Everything must be perfectly consistent, prepared carefully for consumption by millions of eyeballs — and wallets.

Sheil, too, is beginning a new chapter: shortly after I met with her, she moved into a new home, and she’s started sharing videos with titles like, “home owner era.” For many influencers, life’s proudest, most precious moments are also excellent fodder to use to pump out content — perhaps even more so if you have something to sell your audience, like new kitchen gadgets or bedroom furniture. 

Both Sheil and Gifford are young women who’ve made careers on the backs of digital overload, acting as personal shoppers to millions of strangers. They’re so good at their jobs that they just bought homes. Sheil has two cats and Gifford, two dogs. At times, these relatively ordinary parallels between the two are what strike me the most: it’s like meeting someone else in the same audience segment that advertisers use to send you targeted ads. I suppose I might be a little freaked out by my digital doppelganger, too.

At this point, I’ve watched so many Amazon product recommendation videos in the course of reporting this story that my personalized For You page is starting to look noticeably more beige. I recall something Sheil said about her own Amazon homepage: the more you shop for neutrals, the more cream items the site will show you. If you buy a cute loungewear set, it will suggest others. Influencers likely are finding the bulk of their products on their own, but the ecosystem that they — and the rest of us — shop in is built on what other people are doing. 

Eventually, I encounter so many similar videos that they all begin to blend together. I don’t recall anyone’s name, face, or distinct manner of speaking. I don’t even remember what product they say they “absolutely love.” But I, and generations of shoppers hooked on fast, cheap, and frictionless shopping, relentlessly optimized for the lowest common denominator, will know where to buy it.