How Much of the Internet Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually.
How Much
of the Internet Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually.
Photo:
Artwork by Ayatgali Tuleubek
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. Digital advertisers
tend to want two things: people to look at their ads and “premium” websites —
i.e., established and legitimate publications — on which to host them.
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. Views, meanwhile, were faked by malware-infected computers with marvelously sophisticated techniques to imitate humans: bots “faked clicks, mouse movements, and social network login information to masquerade as engaged human consumers.”
Some were sent to browse the
internet to gather tracking cookies from other websites, just as a human
visitor would have done through regular behavior. Fake people with fake cookies
and fake social-media accounts, fake-moving their fake cursors, fake-clicking
on fake websites — the fraudsters had essentially created a simulacrum of the
internet, where the only real things were the ads.
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.”
In the future, when I look back from the high-tech gamer jail in
which President
PewDiePie will have imprisoned me, I will remember 2018 as the year
the internet passed the Inversion, not in some strict numerical sense, since
bots already outnumber humans online more years than not, but in the perceptual
sense. The internet has always played host in its dark corners to schools of
catfish and embassies of Nigerian princes, but that darkness now pervades its
every aspect: 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 particular 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,
trackable, 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 an
exhaustive list at MarketingLand, over the past two years Facebook
has admitted to misreporting the reach of posts on Facebook Pages (in two different
ways), the rate at which viewers complete ad videos, the average time spent
reading its “Instant Articles,” the amount of referral traffic from Facebook to
external websites, the number of views that videos received via Facebook’s
mobile site, and the number of video views in Instant Articles.
Can we still trust the metrics? After the Inversion, what’s the
point? Even when we put our faith in their accuracy, there’s something not
quite real about them: 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.
The people are fake.
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,” as the Times reminded
readers with a lengthy investigation in August. The company says
only “a tiny fraction” of its traffic is fake, but fake subscribers are 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; oftentimes, customers are led to believe that the views they
purchase come from real people. More likely, they come from bots. 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
on shelves or racks in professional-looking offices, each watching the same
video or downloading the same app.
The businesses are fake.
The money is usually real. Not always — ask someone who
enthusiastically got into cryptocurrency this time last year — but often enough
to be an engine of the Inversion. If the money is real, why does anything else
need to be? Earlier this year, the writer and artist Jenny Odell began to look
into an Amazon reseller that had bought goods from other Amazon resellers and
resold them, again on Amazon, at higher prices. Odell
discovered an elaborate network of fake price-gouging and copyright-stealing
businesses connected to the cultlike Evangelical church whose
followers resurrected Newsweek in
2013 as a zombie search-engine-optimized spam farm. She visited a strange
bookstore operated by the resellers in San Francisco and found a stunted
concrete reproduction of the dazzlingly phony storefronts she’d encountered on
Amazon, arranged haphazardly with best-selling books, plastic tchotchkes, and
beauty products apparently bought from wholesalers. “At some point I began to
feel like I was in a dream,” she wrote. “Or that I was half-awake, unable to
distinguish the virtual from the real, the local from the global, a product
from a Photoshop image, the sincere from the insincere.”
The content is fake.
The only site that gives me that dizzying sensation of unreality
as often as Amazon does is YouTube, which plays host to weeks’ worth of
inverted, inhuman content. TV episodes that have been mirror-flipped to avoid
copyright takedowns air next to huckster vloggers flogging merch who air next
to anonymously
produced videos that are ostensibly for children. An animated video
of Spider-Man and Elsa from Frozen riding
tractors is not, you know, not real:
Some poor soul animated it and gave voice to its actors, and I have no doubt
that some number (dozens? Hundreds? Millions? Sure, why not?) of kids have sat
and watched it and found some mystifying, occult enjoyment in it. But it’s
certainly not “official,” and it’s hard, watching it onscreen as an adult, to
understand where it came from and what it means that the view count beneath it
is continually ticking up.
These, at least, are mostly bootleg videos of popular fictional
characters, i.e., counterfeit unreality. 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.) Contrary to what you might expect, a world
suffused with deepfakes and other artificially generated photographic images
won’t be one in which “fake” images are routinely believed to be real, but one
in which “real” images are routinely believed to be fake — simply because, in
the wake of the Inversion, who’ll be able to tell the difference?
Our politics are fake.
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 scammed and 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 — a process they call “red-pilling” after the scene in The Matrix when the
computer simulation falls away and reality appears. 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.
We ourselves are fake.
Which, well. Everywhere I went online this year, I was asked to
prove I’m a human. Can you retype this distorted word? Can you transcribe this
house number? Can you select the images that contain a motorcycle? I found
myself prostrate daily at the feet of robot bouncers, frantically showing off
my highly developed pattern-matching skills — does a Vespa count as a
motorcycle, even? — so I could get into nightclubs I’m not even sure I want to
enter. Once inside, I was directed by dopamine-feedback loops to scroll well
past any healthy point, manipulated by emotionally charged headlines and posts
to click on things I didn’t care about, and harried and hectored and
sweet-talked into arguments and purchases and relationships so algorithmically
determined it was hard to describe them as real.
Where does that leave us? I’m not sure the solution is to seek out
some pre-Inversion authenticity — to red-pill ourselves back to “reality.”
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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