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“How Much of the Internet Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually”

By Max Read

In late November, the Justice Department unsealed indictments against eight people accused of fleecing advertisers of $36 million in two of the largest digital ad-fraud operations ever uncovered. Fraudsters had essentially created a simulacrum of the internet where the only real things were the ads. The scammers infected 1.7 million computers with malware that remotely directed traffic to “spoofed” websites–“empty websites designed for bot traffic” that would serve 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.

Views, meanwhile, were faked by malware-infected computers with marvelously sophisticated techniques for imitating humans: Bots “faked clicks, mouse movements, and social network login information.” Some browsed the internet in order to gather tracking cookies from other websites, just as a human visitor would. Fake people with fake cookies and fake social-media accounts, fake-moving their fake cursors, fake-clicking on fake websites.

The web has always played host in its dark corners to Nigerian princes and schools of catfish, but that darkness now pervades every aspect of the internet. How much of the internet is fake? Studies generally suggest that, year after year, less than 60 percent of web traffic is human; some years, according to some researchers, 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.”

I will remember 2018 as the year the internet passed the Inversion, not in some strict numerical sense, since bots long ago outnumbered humans online, but in the perceptual sense. Everything that once seemed definitively and unquestionably real now seems slightly fake; everything that once seemed slightly fake now has the power and presence of the real. The “fakeness” of the post-Inversion internet is less a calculable falsehood and more a quality of experience–the uncanny sense that what you encounter online is not “real” but is also undeniably not “fake,” and indeed may be both at once, or in succession, as you turn it over in your head.

Take something as seemingly simple as how we measure web traffic. Metrics should be the most real thing on the internet: They are countable and verifiable, and their existence undergirds the advertising business that drives our biggest social and search platforms. Yet not even Facebook, the world’s greatest data-gathering organization, seems able to produce genuine figures. In October, small advertisers filed suit against the social-media giant, accusing it of covering up, for a year, its significant overstatements of the time users spent watching videos on the platform (by 60 to 80 percent, Facebook says; by 150 to 900 percent, the plaintiffs say). According to Marketing Land, over the past two years Facebook has admitted to misreporting the reach of posts on Facebook Pages, the rate at which viewers complete ad videos, the average time spent reading its “Instant Articles,” the amount of referral traffic to external websites, the number of views that videos received via Facebook’s mobile site, and the number of video views in Instant Articles.

Even when we do put our faith in their accuracy, there’s something not quite real about internet metrics: My favorite statistic this year was Facebook’s claim that 75 million people watched at least a minute of Facebook Watch videos every day–though, as Facebook admitted, the 60 seconds in that one minute didn’t need to be watched consecutively. Real videos, real people, fake minutes.

And maybe we shouldn’t even assume that the people are real. Over at YouTube, the business of buying and selling video views is “flourishing,” the Times reminded readers in August. YouTube says only “a tiny fraction” of its traffic is fake, but it’s enough of a problem that the site undertook a purge of “spam accounts” in mid-December. These days, the Times found, you can buy 5,000 YouTube views–30 seconds of a video counts as a view–for as low as $15. On some platforms, video views and app downloads can be forged in lucrative industrial counterfeiting operations. If you want a picture of what the Inversion looks like, find a video of a “click farm”: hundreds of individual smartphones, arranged in rows in professional-looking offices, each watching the same video or downloading the same app.

This is obviously not real human traffic. But what would real human traffic look like? The Inversion gives rise to some odd philosophical quandaries: If a Russian troll using a Brazilian man’s photograph to masquerade as an American Trump supporter watches a video on Facebook, is that view “real”? Not only do we have bots masquerading as humans and humans masquerading as other humans, but also sometimes humans masquerading as bots, pretending to be “artificial-intelligence personal assistants,” like Facebook’s “M,” in order to help tech companies appear to possess cutting-edge AI. Even humans who aren’t masquerading can contort themselves through layers of diminishing reality: The Atlantic reports that human influencers are posting fake sponsored content–that is, content meant to look like content that is meant to look authentic, for free–to attract attention from brand reps, who, they hope, will pay them real money.

On Amazon, fake storefronts sell real goods propped up by fake reviews. On YouTube, TV episodes that have been mirror-flipped to avoid copyright takedowns air next to huckster vloggers flogging merch who air next to anonymously produced bootleg videos of popular children’s-show characters. The spoofed videos are counterfeit fictions. Counterfeit reality is still more difficult to find–for now. In January 2018, an anonymous Redditor created a relatively easy-to-use desktop-app implementation of “deepfakes,” the now-infamous technology that uses artificial-intelligence image processing to replace one face in a video with another–putting, say, a politician’s over a porn star’s. A recent academic paper from researchers at the graphics-card company Nvidia demonstrates a similar technique used to create images of computer-generated “human” faces that look shockingly like photographs of real people. (Next time Russians want to puppeteer a group of invented Americans on Facebook, they won’t even need to steal photos of real people.)

Such a loss of any anchoring “reality” only makes us pine for it more. Our politics have been inverted along with everything else, suffused with a Gnostic sense that we’re being defrauded and lied to but that a “real truth” still lurks somewhere. Adolescents are deeply engaged by YouTube videos that promise to show the hard reality beneath the “scams” of feminism and diversity. Political arguments now involve trading accusations of “virtue signaling”–the idea that liberals are faking their politics for social reward–against charges of being Russian bots. The only thing anyone can agree on is that everyone online is lying and fake.

Still, I’m not sure the solution is to seek out some pre-Inversion authenticity. What’s gone from the internet, after all, isn’t “truth,” but trust: the sense that the people and things we encounter are what they represent themselves to be. Years of metrics-driven growth, lucrative manipulative systems, and unregulated platform marketplaces have created an environment where it makes more sense to be fake online–to be disingenuous and cynical, to lie and cheat, to misrepresent and distort–than it does to be real. Fixing that would require cultural and political reform in Silicon Valley and around the world, but it’s our only choice. Otherwise, we’ll all end up on the bot internet of fake people, fake clicks, fake sites, and fake computers, where the only real thing is the ads.

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