How Much Internet Traffic Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually.

Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shared this article from New York magazine:
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... Hucksters infected 1.7 million computers with malware that remotely directed traffic to 'spoofed' websites.... [B]ots '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....'
[N]ot 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 80âpercent, 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.

On Twitter the author also shared a Twitter thread by the Washington Post's director of advertising technology, who shares his own complaints about the ecosystem of online advertising. 'The problem isn't just that the internet is full of fakery and bullshit and bad numbers and malfunctioning metrics and bullshitters and fraudsters. The problem is that all the fake shit is layered on top of other fake shit and it just COMPOUNDS itself... Like you get fake users, who get autoplay videos which no one is really watching....

'That's not even counting the entire ad campaigns that are fake where the product is just a bullshit excuse to collect data on you.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.