Steemit, one day, the public will see the purpose of the divergence from beltway social media.
2017: A Russian Went Inside A Chinese Click-Farm: This Is What He Found
Since then there have been crackdowns (self-regulated) and also numerous "advertising metric errors," but still, as recently as March of this year, scientists at USC and Indiana University discovered up to 15% of Twitter accounts could be fake. Since Twitter currently has 319 million monthly active users, that translates to nearly 48 million bot accounts, using USC's high-end estimate. The report goes on to say that complex bots could have shown up as humans in their model, "making even the 15% figure a conservative estimate." At 15 percent, the evaluation is far greater than Twitter's own estimates.
In a filing with the SEC last month, Twitter said that up to 8.5 percent of all active accounts contacted Twitter's servers "…without any discernable additional user-initiated action."
Twitter fudging it’s user analytics is nothing surprising, more so a comfort to it’s brain dead investors, but this story metastasizes into something far more revealing.
So, if they're not human, where do all those "likes," "retweets," and "followers" lighting up your social media accounts from? Thanks to this Russian gentleman - who visited a Chinese click farm, where they make fake ratings for mobile apps and other things like this - we now know...
That’s right, online controversies, initiated by social media bots. One questions, who is financing these social media boiler rooms?
Social media, once a tool used to circumvent the fourth estate and the government in the divergence of information, is becoming none other than a informational gulag itself.
The bottom line is simple "The illusion of a massive following is often just that," said Tony Harris,
What does this mean for all the massive movements with online activity? Are they fake? Something you commonly hear in the news is nation states and their contractors weaponizing the fourth estate — but social media? Come to your own conclusions as to the actual intrinsic value of social media...
Recently, Facebook got into hot water with investors when it was revealed that as many of its 1.18 billion active users 14.1 million (and likely orders of magnitude more) were fraudulent. Things are even worse at Twitter, where Italian security researchers Andrea Stroppa and Carlo De Micheli found that of the social network's 232 million monthly active users about 20 million are fake and for sale, while Jason Ding of Barracuda Labs said 10% of more of all Twitter accounts are fake.