How many times do you routinely prove that you are human? Retyping texts, matching photos of motorcycles and traffic lights. Ot some such ridiculous things? Have you wondered why? Because most of the Internet we encounter today is Fake.
How much you ask? Max Read in his immensely educative article in New York Magazine writes, “…Studies generally suggest that, year after year, less than 60 percent of web traffic is human; … a healthy majority of it is bot. 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.”
The implications are extensive. Metrics that you see are fake (the worst offenders are Facebook and YouTube, but it is literally everywhere – check the article for details ), so are people, businesses, content, politics and this whole new situation of proving that we are real.
To make sense of where this is headed I recommend you read this piece.
Where I learnt this #340
How Much of the Internet Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually.
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/how-much-of-the-internet-is-fake.html
