News like this should not be a surprise to anyone.
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.”
I still remember when these bots were in their infancy back in the early 2000’s, when my family and I ran a phpBB2 forum at the time and we were invaded by tons and tons of bots several times throughout the day. The concept was still fairly new, as the bots never typed anything but only made tons and tons of accounts usually ending in Petrov or something. It was annoying back then because there were no captcha’s, there was no need for them because nothing like this happened. I ended up having to disable account creation temporarily as a result while having to clean up warzone and block all the account names from ever being used again, as well as any IP address. These days its much more advanced just as described in the article. Their programing is sophisticated enough that they can join all these social media websites and go about the internet as actual people, and these trolls keep taking it steps further when creating websites to further mask their intent. It is so easy in this day and age to come up with a straight up legit looking business or news media site, and people fall for it hook line and sinker. I could easily build a website that looks like a local news rag, or with the right amount of words and pump a straight up legit looking news website that talks about important things, like why the boogieman won’t come out of the closet.
I’ve loved the internet since the day of its conception, but at the same time I always knew that like anything else in life it can be manipulated to cause harm instead of good. I just never could have predicted how far it has come, and I have a feeling we haven’t even scratched the surface yet.