How much of the internet and digital environment many now live their lives entirely engulfed in is completely fake? A disturbing report in New York Magazine lays out some key facts, beginning with the following astounding trend:
For a period of time in 2013, the Times reported this year, a full half of YouTube traffic was “bots masquerading as people,” a portion so high that employees feared an inflection point after which YouTube’s systems for detecting fraudulent traffic would begin to regard bot traffic as real and human traffic as fake. They called this hypothetical event “the Inversion.”
Some of the methods and data revealing just how we arrived at a largely "fake internet" were revealed by alarming Justice Department findings based on unsealed indictments against eight people involved in what's widely considered among the largest digital ad-fraud operations ever uncovered, as the accused fleeced advertisers to the tune of $36 million.
NY Mag explains of their methods, which are indicative of what's happening more broadly:
The two schemes at issue in the case, dubbed Methbot and 3ve by the security researchers who found them, faked both. Hucksters infected 1.7 million computers with malware that remotely directed traffic to “spoofed” websites — “empty websites designed for bot traffic” that served up a video ad purchased from one of the internet’s vast programmatic ad-exchanges, but that were designed, according to the indictments, “to fool advertisers into thinking that an impression of their ad was served on a premium publisher site,” like that of Vogue or The Economist.
This resulted in an army of bots that could imitate humans producing “faked clicks, mouse movements, and social network login information to masquerade as engaged human consumers” — as one exhaustive study demonstrated.
Studies compiled over past years suggest a general trend, notes NY Mag, that less than 60 percent off all web traffic is human, with some researchers finding a "healthy majority" of this to be bots.
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Realist - Everybody in America is soft, and hates conflict. The cure for this, both in politics and social life, is the same -- hardihood. Give them raw truth.
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