Everything looks fake on the internet nowadays.
Fake news has been the most debated topic of recent years. Websites that publish misleading information has hit across the internet and were also shared on social media to increase their reach.
People in America always read online and they rarely trust the news that they read on social media.
According to a global survey, 86% of the internet users have been duped by fake news all over the world. Most of the fake news are told to be spread on Facebook.
According to the annual Ipsos survey, the US has the lion’s share of the blame for spreading fake news, followed by Russia and China.
According to New York Magazine, 40% of activity on the interent is fake.
Let’s Dive into the topic now.
Metrics are Fake
Metrics has been the most real thing on the internet. Metrics are trackable, countable, and verifiable. Existence of metrics drives the advertising business on social and search platforms.
(acumen)
Web Traffic
In recent years, studies suggest that around around 60% of the web traffic is human.
How can the web traffic be calculated?
Analytics tools put a piece of code on a website which places a cookie in the browser and record. But if an ad blocker is used, it stops the code from working. Also said that, 22% of people in UK use ad blockers. So, they dont even show up in analytics.
Analysts found that 50% of website traffic is bots. A bot can be sent to any website and do whatever someone want.
YouTube
According to the Times report, 50% of the YouTube traffic was “bots masquerading as people,”.
Also states that 5,000 views can be bought for as low as $15.
There are also click farms in China which consists of employees spend their working hours all day long to rewatch the videos by revisiting the same videos and downloading the same apps over and over again.
New York Times found that aperson from Canada made $200,000 in 2018 from 15 million fake YouTube views.
(nypost)
Amazon
Facebook has thousands of members with some groups who buy and sell reviews on Amazon.
According to BuzzFeed news, a positive review for a pair of headphones can get $36. Do these kind of reviews actually mean anything?
61% of the Amazon reviews of electronic products are fake according to the Washington Post.
(bumping)
People can buy followers to a get high number in Twitter. But those followers are only bots.
Research from a couple of American universities states that 15% of twitter accounts are bots.
New York TImes set up a dummy account on Twitter and paid $225 to get 25,000 followers in account.
(nytimes)
Although Facebook is known as the world’s greatest data gathering organization, seems not able to produce genuine figures.
Facebook claims that 75 million users watched at least a minute of videos every day. Though admits that 60 seconds in that one minute need not be watched consecutively.
According to Wall Street Journal, Facebook misjudged the metrics by 60% – 80%. Plaintiffs say that it is likely to be 150% – 190%. Regardless, Facebook has admitted to misreporting the metrics.
(wsj)
People are Fake
According to Times, buying and selling video views has been flourishing. It is hard to assume that the people are real.
Companies do accept that only a tiny fraction of its traffic is fake. But Fake subscribers is itself a problem.
People are made to believe that the views purchased are from real people but they come from bots from the click farms.
(nymag)
Businesses are Fake
Is the money usually real? Not always – ask someone who got into cryptocurrency.
Jenny Odell states that some sellers bought the goods from other Amazon resellers and resold them on Amazon at higher prices. She also discovered price-gouging and copyright-stealing businesses.
She also visited a strange resellers bookstore in San Francisco and found a a stunted concrete reproduction of the dazzlingly phony storefronts.
(nytimes)
Content is Fake
Content has become fake in recent times. To avoid copyrights TV episodes have been mirror-flipped. Anonymous videos are produced that are ostensibly for children which is mystifying.
Many technologies are emerged to fake the content like an artificial-intelligence image processing used in a video to replace a persons face with an another.
World is full of deepfakes and artificial photographic images, fake images are believed to be real and real images are believed to be fake.
(cnbc)
Politics are Fake
Politics are mostly confused in the real world. People are defrauded, scammed, and lied too but the truth lurks somewhere.
Adolescents are engaged by videos deeply which hardly show the reality beneath the scams of diversity and feminism.
The only thing one can agree is that everyone online is fake.
(nymag)
Final Thought
World’s environment has been created to be fake online and there it makes more sense. Years of metrics has driven growth, unregulated platform marketplaces, manipulative systems are the causes of this fake internet. Fixing this would require political and cultural reform around the world. Otherwise, we shall end up on the bot internet of fake clicks, fake people, fake computers, and fake sites where ads is the only real thing.