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 internet is a great tool, potentially, for accessibility. But what happens when what you are accessing is a Matrix-like tissue of misrepresentation.
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.
The yield to effort dwindles pretty dramatically. Only 60% is human. Of the 60%, at best only half are focusing on facts rather than opinions. Down to 30%. Of the 30% only half even come close to getting their facts right. Down to 15%. And of the conversations that are human, are fact-based, and have some credibility, perhaps only 10% are of topical interest. Down to 1.5%.
98.5% cognitive pollution and 1.5% yield. That's a pretty tenuous value proposition.
UPDATE: And ready-to-hand, here is an example. From Media fabricated narrative about conservatives mocking Ocasio-Cortez dance video by William A. Jacobson.
Left and right both seem obsessed with AOC which is a separate, but intriguing, phenomenon in itself. Why does a person with such meager accomplishments command so much attention? Sure, she is young and attractive which drives a lot of human attention. She is extremely deft with social media is part of the explanation. Is that the totality of the explanation? Not sure, but it is interesting. Not dissimilar to young Obama - achievement lite but in Joe Biden's words:
"I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy," Biden said. "I mean, that's a storybook, man."And as it turned out, that was sufficient substitute for accomplishment.
Jacobson is focusing on a blip this past week.
Did you hear the one about Republicans trying to shame Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez over her college dance video, and being angry about it?I saw a number of such headlines. Jacobson shows the headlines from the New York Times, CNN, NBC, Reuters and the like.
But this was one of those occasions which happen with some frequency when the mainstream media headlines don't seem to match what I see happening in the world. Some of it is understandable. I follow international relations pretty closely with information feeds from all over the world. Given the dearth of mainstream media interest in foreign affairs, it is not surprising that their occasional news reportage might differ materially from all the other foreign sources I read.
But even in the US there are occasions such as this one where the MSM seem to be reporting in lock-step on something that is simply not on my radar screen. Occasionally I dive in to check my impression of reality versus what I am being told by the MSM is reality. For example, on the sustained MSM claim that there is a high and rising level of white nationalism and terrorism: When ideological narratives and data collide. White nationalism is, per the data, minuscule, moribund, and numerically inconsequential. But you wouldn't know that looking solely at the MSM headlines.
The MSM can generate fake news far faster than I have the time or inclination to investigate.
The AOC dance video headlines were one such instance. I cast a pretty broad information net in terms of across the spectrum range, in terms of number of sites and sources, and in terms of non-political interests. If there were outrage on the right about this AOC dance video I would have thought that I would have heard some sort of whisper among the usual suspects. But I didn't. The only places I was seeing reporting of outrage was from the MSM. Could this be another instance of MSM smoke with no underlying fire? Probably, but so profoundly inconsequential it wasn't worth looking into.
Jacobson embeds the video so I get to see it for the first time.
Double click to enlarge.
OK. Nothing controversial here. No political statements. Nothing but a surprisingly high quality college dance production. If you worked really hard, you might be able to get to a curmudgeonly "Kids these days" or "When I was a student I studied 20 hours a day while working 14 hours in the coal mine" or some such.
Not dissimilar to the response from the right side of the bleachers when the the USNA midshipman produced their cover of the global phenomenon video, Gangnam Style a few years ago.
Double click to enlarge.
Sure, some curmudgeonly "conduct unbecoming" grumbles but by-and-large good humor at youthful exuberance.
I am left with the MSM claim that there is a lot of right bleacher outrage while at the same time I am looking at the right bleachers and people are sipping cokes, chatting, etc.
Jacobson did the hard work.
That claim echoed through many mainstream media outlets late last week into the weekend. But it was a media fabrication, Fake News in the worst, most devious way intended to shape public perception. Multiply this incident by thousands of times, and you can understand how manipulative mainstream media is, and how major news outlets are able to frame a narrative of evil, mean Republicans that influences our politics, particularly among younger people.I am sure that there must have been a few curmudgeonly comments from somewhere out there in right field once the zone was flooded with the fake reporting. But this is like a push survey. The MSM pushes a false story to get a reaction that can then be used to justify the original fake story.
I first learned of the video when I saw tweets about the supposed shaming and anger.
[snip]
But I didn’t understand what it was all about, because I had not seen anyone trying to shame Ocasio-Cortez about a video, or expressing anger about it. No one.
[snip]
It all started with a single anonymous Twitter account. One account. Anonymous. So anonymous that part of username was “Anonymous”.
Dave Rubin tweeted:
I try not to tweet on the weekend but this is on point and important. The story was completely made up. Fake News for all to see. (Also often controversies are started by anonymous accounts that are actually left wing journalists. I’m guessing that’ll be exposed more this year.)He linked to Benny Johnson’s documentation of how the false claim spread in the media:
Benny Johnson posted on Twitter how the anonymous account in the Newsweek article appears to be the only source cited by numerous media outlets that ran with the story:
Can anyone on the internet find me a *single* human Republican (not an anonymous bot account) that was offended by AOC dancing.
This should not be hard, right?
This “scandal” was covered in Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, Reuters etc
So where’s the evidence?
Seriously.
* * *
Where is the evidence that *any* Republican was offended?
Where is the evidence that *any* Republican shamed her?
Where is the fact-check on this by the “Democracy Dies in Darkness” crowd?
These outlets are legitimately running fake stories to own the cons for AOC
* * *
It’s been remarkable the last few years to observe the beehive group-think mentality of the media on stories like this, Mueller, Russia, Trump, 2016.
No evidence. No facts. Just propaganda for the left, nicely packaged.
1. Create an imaginary monster
2. Slay imaginary monster
Sort of like when CNN or whomever it was that sent a couple of middle eastern appearing actors (man and woman) clad in traditional middle eastern garb sometime after 9/11 to a NASCAR event in order to document the wrenching xenophobia of America and were disappointed to only be able to document curiosity and courtesy.
It would seem that an industry with declining readers and constantly being assailed for pushing Fake News might have greater self-discipline about publishing obviously Fake News, but clearly not. Trump's claims are way overstated but the MSM keeps providing evidence to support those claims. An odd behavior that doesn't seem to have any evolutionary advantage.
UPDATE: Oh, man! Another AOC dance video piece? Heh.
When Dancing Plagues Struck Medieval Europe https://t.co/qkg9Ola4lE via @JSTOR_Daily
— Allen Mendenhall (@allenmendenhall) January 10, 2019
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