How much of the internet is fake? It was a question recently raised by the New York Maganize, who after surveying discovered that about 40% of digital activity is false.
It began with some fraud schemes revealed, such as the case of Cheetah Mobile developer Clean Master and other minor but still worrying cases, all related to false advertising and disclosure. And it now occurred that some victims thought their ads were being advertised on celebrity sites and getting great attention, but both the ad views and the sites themselves were fake.
With ad monetization and the exponential growth of social platforms, bots also increased on a large scale. For example: in 2013 on YouTube the number of bots was so high that the developers were afraid to exaggerate the algorithms and end up making humans go through programs.
Buying clicks or followers also have a highlight in this. These services assure customers that they will have a certain number of views or followers. Naturally, both are usually generated by bots and not by humans, which motivated, for example, the cleaning of YouTube spam.
Years of metric growth, profitable manipulative systems, and unregulated platforms markets have created an environment where it makes more sense to be fake online than to be honest. To fix this, a cultural and political reform would be needed in Silicon Valley and around the world, but it is our only choice. Otherwise, we’re going to end up on an internet dominated by bots, fake people, fake clicks, fake sites and fake computers, where the real thing is the ads. – New York Maganize
The Cambridge Analytica controversy that haunts Facebook so far has shown that political groups are interested in buying our information (and whoever sells it) to influence our opinions. That is, neither is politics safe. Over 40% of the activity on the internet is fake, and a good part of their data manipulated.
