More than 40% of the traffic on the Internet is fake, and people are fake!

The following article is from Silicon Publishing By Lynn Yang

This male only focuses on trends.

Source: Silicon Publishing

Probably this time last year, a major event occurred in the domestic marketing community: Party A commissioned a traffic head agency to do promotion. The result: the product received 3.53 million views, thousands of comments, thousands of likes, but the actual transaction volume is zero, the traffic of the introduced Party A stores is also close to zero.

Although many times, the product's exposure and conversion rate are indeed two different things, but later party A wrote to the end of thisWhat is the position of "fake traffic" in the global Internet traffic chess game?

Let me give you a few macro data.

But another, more important issue may be：Inflection point and reversal。 If you give up looking at the problem from a single point of view, in fact, a question about "inflection/inverse" in the Internet world is becoming apparent. I do not know:Blur out when the singrages of "true" and "fake" in the information world will comeBut some of the signs that will come out in 2019 are worth watching out for.

Let me make a special statement first: for a variety of reasons, where the following business cases are involved, I will only list the situation in the U.S. technology community.

One.

Let's start with the conclusion:Currently globalLess than 60% of the traffic on the Internet is generated by real humans.

In 2013, Bloomberg recorded a man named Ron. Amran's story.

Amran is responsible for advertising spending by SPRINT, the US operator. Television ads, he says, are like "shoot first and aim later" and have two weaknesses: they are expensive, and half of the bullets don't hit "target customers" and are wasted.

But times soon created new things:

Yahoo and Google went public, and the ad price of online ads was greatly reduced; then procedural ads emerged that allowed Ford to run pickup truck ads for men aged 25-40 and even for men aged 25-40 who had viewed pickup truck information in the past six months.

Amran was happy because he finally knew where every dollar went and whether the money had finished the work.

Then.He has converted to heine heine heinely. Heineton's annual advertising budget in the United States is $150 million, and in the second half of 2013, Amran and colleagues introduced the effectiveness of online advertising in a Conference Room in New York. As a result, everyone was stunned.

Digital's ROI is approximately 2:1。 That is, for every $1 spent on advertising, you can increase your revenue by $2.

TV ads are at least 6:1.Revenue can increase by $6 for every $1 spent on advertising.

What's even more surprising is that:In the digital world, about 20% of advertising is not "seen" by real people。

Five years later, in December 2018, Intelligencer, a publication of New York Magazine, reported a number:

Year after year, less than 60% of network traffic is actually human.In other false traffic, most are robots reading information.

In other words: (online world)The indicator is false.

Two.

Second, people are fake, too.

In the first quarter of last year, Facebook deleted it, according to VOX, the US media2.2 billionfake accounts. It's a huge digital leap.

Because if we look ahead: Facebook deleted 1.2 billion fake accounts in the fourth quarter of 2018; 750,000 the previous quarter; and in the first quarter of 2018, Facebook deleted fewer than 600,000 fake accounts.

In other words, the entire fake account is generated at a rate of 600,000 to 750,000, 750,000 to 1.2 billion, 1.2 billion to 2.2 billion.

To make matters worse: these fake accounts seem to have grown at a "tipping point"Because the number of fake accounts facebook deleted in the first quarter of this year is equivalent to the number of real accounts registered by actual humans on its platform in the first quarter of this year.

Most of the fake accounts that were processed were deleted by Facebook within minutes of their creation.

Early last year, the critic Aaron Greenspan said: "Half of Facebook's users may be fake because it doesn't actually have an accurate way to measure what a fake account is."

Facebook lashed out, but admitted:It's really hard to count accurate data,And because these data fluctuate and change a lot,My own understanding of this is still very superficial.

It's important to note that the numbers here are just fake accounts that have been deleted. According to Rami Essaid, founder of Distil Networks, a cybersecurity firm dedicated to eliminating cyberbots:

"Social media is such a virtual world, half robots and half real people. You can't take any tweet at face value. And not everything is what it seems."

Three.

Third, the content is also false.

This is probably the most confusing part of all Internet inverse.

On February 21, 2019, the Mimimon WeChat busted. The direct fuse is: its son-in-law published a true and false indesigible explosive article - "the death of a person born in the cold door."

In fact, everyone who's ever done a public name knows thatThe emergence of such fictitious articles is the "inevitable" result of the pursuit of indicators.

Three months before "Yuan" came out, I happened to be in Shanghai with a friend of mine to talk about mass communication. We say:"'News facts class letterIn fact, it has reached the point where it has to be associated with 'fiction fiction information' PK。”

This is a trend. But even after the collapse of the Mimimon, there were a number of content platforms with a large number of news accounts.are actively introducing fictional fiction writers.

But is that all?

According to U.S. media reports, top e-commerce sites are seeing more and more fake reviews.

Fakespot estimates that about 52% of user reviews on Wal-Mart's official website are "untrue and unreliable";On Amazon, that's about 30 percent.

Fakespot uses algorithms that seek to find patterns of spoofing in comments, including hiring professionals to comment, hiring robots to comment, and so on.Amazon says:More than 90% of untrue comments are generated by computers.

It is said that the latest battleground for fake news is now "video", a medium that has been seen by many as reliable evidence of "seeing what is true", but the new algorithm will soon produce highly authentic fake videos.It allows a person you know very well to say in the video what he would not have been able to say.

And that's actually happened.

Last May, Democratic Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi made a video of Trump being pranked, making it look like she was drunk. The revamped video quickly spread across social networks across the United States.

In another case, in a doctored video, U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar showed a disdain for the September 11 terrorist attacks. As a result, this "out of context" of the video led directly to the public's frantic verbal attacks on female parliamentarians.

And a new study just published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology finds:

Artificial intelligence can be very powerful in producing fake information, butI can't tell if the story I'm facing is "right" or "wrong."。 In other words: AI can't fix fake news.

wanton

Now the question is: What exactly is "reversal"?

According to the Times:

For some time in 2013, youTube had half of its traffic coming from robots that "pretend to be human," prompting concerns among YouTube employees.They are concerned that:Once an inflection point occurs，YouTube's system for detecting fraudulent traffic starts to treat fake traffic as realtraffic, which is considered false traffic。 They refer to this hypothetical event as a "reversal".

In the future, maybe when we think about it.The Internet is completely reversed"That year (maybe 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2025, I don't know, maybe it's not a strictly year figure),When robots have overtaken our online humans for years, when darkness hangs over every aspect of the Internet

The reality that was once certain began to become a little false; what once seemed to be a forgery began to have real power in the real world, and to coexist with the truth.

This "reversed" Internet does not mean how many false things can be calculated, but the very special quality experience we feel:None of the things you encounter online are "true", but they can't be said to be "fake" entirely.

And this true and false experience, all the time, has been alternating in your brain.

Wu.

For now, this is still an open question:

Whether the Internet, whether it must "anchor" reality;Or can it have its own life, and is it destined to produce a world of truth and false information?

Two years ago, when I wrote Zuckerberg's "Dead End," I thought the answer was the latter.

I think that the word "true" in what we used to say about "true goodness and beauty" may disappear completely at some point in the future of the free information industry - it's been "eliminated". "True and false" in the information industry will no longer matter, and only "beauty/entertainment" is the key.

Because the future of content is now recognized as VR, you can't even say: in a VR world, true and false things will become more meaningful.

However, the recent series of events in the United States has somewhat shaken my mind.

Land.

Over the past year:

1, the first U.S. law against "fake video": California signed a new law called AB730 that criminalized anyone who distributes fake audio or video about politicians' behavior and speech.

2, U.S. government regulators banned Devumi, a company that specializes in selling false economic indicators of influence, and fined it $2.5 million.

3，Facebook has launched its important "news section" section。 Zuckerberg finally decided to start paying for the work of news organizations, and after a long circle, decided to "do" the news like a traditional newspaper:

Pay to produce content/buy copyrights, and then, by professional editors, pick publications and stories instead of everything being dominated by users and algorithms. (Facebook's main column, News Feed, is still there, and there will still be plenty of fake content in this column))

At the same time, a cloud of regulation hangs over America's tech giants: Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon.

In fact, every state in the United States is now investigating Facebook.

So far, state attorneys general in 47 U.S. states have signed up to the office, which is investigating whether Facebook is "anti-competitive."

The 47 states are also studying whether Facebook violated their state laws. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has long been investigating on behalf of the U.S. government whether Facebook may have violated antitrust laws.

Qi.

Seeing this, you may find it strange:Where's Microsoft, the former monopoly giant?

Doesn't it matter if it's Microsoft?No.But Microsoft, which was once chased by the U.S. government for "Windows hegemony," did not make the list of antitrust investigations this time.

InsteadIn fact, Microsoft has suddenly become an "ethical role model" for the U.S. tech world because of its simplicity, direct, and business model that is completely out of reach of the information industry.

However, it is important to note that:

All this storm in the United States occurs because:The internet, which is close to "reversal", is endangering their political systemAds hacked by Russian forces during the U.S. presidential election, user privacy exploited during the U.S. presidential election, and so on.

In a country that advocates "freedom of speech," it also means that regulation has nowhere to go. The U.S. government is quite embarrassed.And the above-mentioned series of anti-competitive measures, in such a big background.

I was once asked: Is america's technology industry really going backwards?

I don't think so.

I think it's a social development to a certain extent,The relationship between science and technology and societydeteriorating results.

It's just not clear what form Internet reversals like the one that threaten the "heart" will take place in China and when.

Or, it's actually happening all the time.

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More than 40% of the traffic on the Internet is fake, and people are fake!

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