Basically, the internet’s a house of cards
This New York Magazine article entitled “How much of the internet is fake? Turns out, a lot of it, actually” is long, but worth wading through if you want to understand the world we live in.
According to the article, the fakeness of the internet isn’t so much about fake news as the plague of bots, click fraud, simulated video, traffic factories, followers, comments and other stratagems to simulate popularity; the real issue is the Inversion, the tipping point when the number of fake users exceeds real ones: fake accounts collecting fake cookies and fake mouse movements making fake clicks on fake pages, in a kind of parallel universe in which the only real thing is advertising.
On some sites, the fakery is an insult to the intelligence, a level of decay that most social networks dare not tackle for fear of revealing just how little real traffic passes through accounts, because to do so would spell their own ruin, a phenomenon I described several years ago as akin to Blade Runner, a time in the future when technology has managed to create androids so perfect that they are indistinguishable from humans and we need to devise complex personality tests to discern who is who. We have watched in horror in recent years how primitive bots that initially maintained a passive presence among the followers of an account have steadily taken on a life of their…
