9 ms·

How Much of the Internet Is Fake?

122 points by jbegley 8y ago

creaghpatr 8y ago
>Fixing that would require cultural and political reform in Silicon Valley and around the world, but it’s our only choice. Otherwise we’ll all end up on the bot internet of fake people, fake clicks, fake sites, and fake computers, where the only real thing is the ads. The proposed solution, when it originates outside of Silicon Valley, is always a Shakedown, and “Only” a Shakedown.
- diegoperini 8y ago
  What is Shakedown?
  - pvarangot 8y ago
    It's when something is taken by extortion or by making threats, usually in a subtle but still aggressive style. Think mob protection rackets or shady loan repayment stuff.
    - creaghpatr 8y ago
      Yeah, in this case it refers to people begging for the government to step in and make the bad people hurt until the problem goes away.
      - anigbrowl 8y ago
        If people perceive a problem is getting worse, what else so you suggest? People expect government to step in because they wish it to function as the conduit of the public interest, however inefficient. The market is clearly not doing a good job of regulating itself, so what other proposals should people consider?
- orcdork 8y ago
  And the only response, coming from inside silicon valley, is always a callous disregard for anything that might impact that precious financial bottom line.
- CM30 8y ago
  I definitely have some sympathy here. Always feared that the fake news hysteria and bot farm panics and what not seemed like they were leading up to a potential crackdown on alternative news sources, sites and services. That any attempt to crack down on fake news will basically take out dozens (or hundreds/thousands) of legitimate alternate sites in the crossfire.
Balgair 8y ago
"My favorite statistic this year was Facebook’s claim that 75 million people watched at least a minute of Facebook Watch videos every day — though, as Facebook admitted, the 60 seconds in that one minute didn’t need to be watched consecutively. Real videos, real people, fake minutes." With all the recent news [0] coming out around FB and their practices, I've only one thing to say now: I knew they were evil, but I didn't think they were stupid too. [0] 'fake', who knows after this article?
- agumonkey 8y ago
  I tend to consider internet measures to be 0.1% of real world measures anyway. You don't perceive, think, feel the same when you went out to see something in the flesh. If you divide internet time by the ratio of ADD in each user at the time you get epsilon
- ghostbrainalpha 8y ago
  That's a good point, but I think many of these videos only require 5 seconds to really get the point. If Facebook wants to say I watched 1 minute of videos and its because they saw me stop scrolling and continuously digest a couple seconds of some buzzfeed video that is fine with me and I would think is honest. But if their calculations includes videos that I "watched" for 1 second or less than 1 second, and didn't even pause my scrolling.... that is pretty wretched.
  - reaperducer 8y ago
    But if their calculations includes videos that I "watched" for 1 second or less than 1 second, and didn't even pause my scrolling.... that is pretty wretched. Worse, they count videos that auto-played on the page after you scrolled, then walked away from the computer to get a beverage.
- nkurz 8y ago
  I didn't really understand this criticism. If one were to say that American's on average watch almost 4 hours of television per day[1], is it at all misleading that this might not be done in a solid block? All the other criticisms aside, I'm just fine with saying "1 minute per day" even if this involves several short videos. [1] Yes, this actually is the correct figure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_consumption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_consumption. 3 hr 58 min per day; 35.5 hr per week; 77 days per year. And if you are thinking to yourself "Well I don't watch any!", remember that this just means someone else is watching twice the average to make up the difference.
floren 8y ago
> Political arguments now involve trading accusations of “virtue signaling” — the idea that liberals are faking their politics for social reward — against charges of being Russian bots. I particularly enjoyed this sentence coming as it did after the following: > If a Russian troll using a Brazilian man’s photograph to masquerade as an American Trump supporter watches a video on Facebook, is that view “real”? > Next time Russians want to puppeteer a group of invented Americans on Facebook, they won’t even need to steal photos of real people
- claudiawerner 8y ago
  What always gets me about the concept of 'virtue signalling' is that it seems to imply that the virtuous opinion is not sincerely held, because if 'virtue signalling' were to include sincerely held opinions, any statement on a moral issue made to multiple others counts as 'virtue signalling', and suddenly the concept isn't useful any more. For instance, if I say "murder is wrong", does this count as virtue signalling? Should it only count if I secretly believe murder is right? Alternatively, virtue signalling refers to showing off our sincerely held beliefs to gain social credit, but I don't see why that would be bad either; we do many things (like make friends and show our accomplishments) to gain social credit, so why should voicing our opinions (with the effect of having like-minded people befriend you) be such an action to deserve the derision it gets? It seems that "virtue signalling" is a very flimsy accusation; it is to say "you're lying, since nobody could possibly hold such a kind position sincerely". Maybe it's even an effect of an age in which we're so cynical that we expect anyone who holds a kind opinion to be acting insincerely. The answer to accusation of virtue signalling should always be this simple: show evidence that I don't sincerely hold the opinion, then you might be onto something and we can start talking about social credit and instrumental rationality. Until then, an accusation of virtue signalling is as substantive as saying unicorns are real.
  - xamuel 8y ago
    I always interpreted virtue signalling not as implying insincerity, but rather implying the main reason they're broadcasting the belief is to put a spotlight on themselves. If there was a murder in the news and you immediately went on Facebook to post "Murder is bad" so people would Like your post, that's virtue signalling. Of course murder is bad. Only a crazy person would think murder wasn't bad. So there's no point posting that opinion on your feed, unless your goal is to get Likes. A less silly example might be if an acquaintance posts a picture of themselves at a restaurant and you post an unsolicited reply saying "I would never eat that, I'm a vegan." Ok, maybe you really are a vegan, but you're just posting that to look morally superior.
alexandernst 8y ago
I read somewhere that 90% of the internet is porn. If that is correct, then at least 90% of the internet is fake. (because you don't really believe that that pizza guy actually made that beauty fall in love with him, right?)
- alexandernst 8y ago
  So much down votes... Why people in HN don't have any sense of humor?
  - smolder 8y ago
    There are lots of internet forums where jokes are king, not many where consistently high quality discourse is. Then there's the subjectivity of humor, and the question of novelty of a joke about the internet being mostly porn in this internet-centric audience... :)
  - anigbrowl 8y ago
    Perhaps you overestimated your comedic ability.
- Phenomenit 8y ago
  Leaves 5% then.
jolmg 8y ago
> A recent academic paper from researchers at the graphics-card company Nvidia demonstrates a similar technique used to create images of computer-generated “human” faces that look shockingly like photographs of real people. (Next time Russians want to puppeteer a group of invented Americans on Facebook, they won’t even need to steal photos of real people.) Here's the HN discussion about that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18761907 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18761907
rossdavidh 8y ago
Hypothesis: most of advertising has always been fake. The subscription numbers of newspapers did not equal the number of people seeing your ad, and even if they did see it they probably didn't pay much attention. The 70's TV-watcher would use the commercial break to go to the restroom. People listening to a 30's radio serial would talk to each other about it during the ad, I bet. Anything driven by ads, is inherently going to be mostly fake, since it is not usually information that the user wants, but you're trying to convince the user that they want it. Which is easier, forcing the user to pay attention to the ad, or convincing the person paying for the ad, that it happened when it did not? The latter will always be easier.
- rossdavidh 8y ago
  I have given this hypothesis about 2 minutes' thought, so it could be wrong, of course.
- coffeefirst 8y ago
  Yes and no. TV audiences were measured through surveys. You have margins of error and some percentage of viewers going to the bathroom, but by and large, you were paying for placement in a show with 500k viewers. Some of them wouldn't see it, but you're getting what you paid for. The rampant fraud we're talking about involves making a fake website (or taking a real one and hot-swapping its ad code) pointing a farm of devices at it and tricking the analytics services AND the buyers into thinking they were put in front of the audience of 500k people, give or take, when 0 of them are human. The only way a scam like this works is because the ads are sold by robots, bought by robots, and measured by robots in lots of small batches, so a person can't just look at the site on their laptop and confirm that their ads are running even if they wanted to.
  - DrScump 8y ago
    TV audiences were measured through surveys. ... and live metering services like Nielsen, who installed their own metering hardware in participating households' TVs and VCRs and polled them daily over a dedicated phone line.
- 8y ago
livueta 8y ago
> What’s gone from the internet, after all, isn’t “truth,” but trust: the sense that the people and things we encounter are what they represent themselves to be. I wonder if attitudes towards trusting content on the internet are partially a generational thing. Frankly, the idea that "trust" ever really existed on the internet (post very early days, anyway) strikes me as slightly absurd. Having gotten online in the late 90s/early 2000s, my default position, augmented by countless stranger-danger-type warnings from parents and teachers and slightly tongue-in-cheek disclaimers on websites[1], was that everything was bullshit until proven otherwise. I don't want to sound too sanctimonious, but that sort of skeptical attitude is a good defense against being taken in. In contrast, I've (totally anecdotally) seen older age cohorts and/or people who just ended up online later for whatever reasons develop much more relaxed, trusting attitudes towards internet content. The stereotypical boomer aunt for whom Facebook is the internet tends to be much less suspicious of content they see, as, after all, it's being posted by their real life friends! Why would one's real life friends go on the internet and tell lies? This is as good a place as any to plug my pet theory that real-name policies are actively harmful, as they incorrectly imply trust where none should exist. This dynamic, coupled with attitudes towards media outlets tuned by eras in which there were only a handful of (generally) credible outlets, seems to be a recipe for complete credulousness when transplanted into a low-trust medium like the internet. So, rather than a redefining of the essential qualities of the internet, what seems to be in the offing is a general recalibration away from overly-trusting models of thought among segments of the population who never really developed the sort of awareness that I'd argue is necessary for not ending up as a total dupe. Of course, the article's points on _why_ a lot of fake content exists totally stand - profit motive is a massive driver of that sort of behavior, and I genuinely hope that the ad model crumbles under the weight of its own depravity. --- [1] "The stories and information posted here are artistic works of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
smolder 8y ago
I like to think about ways we might disrupt traditional advertising models. I am not too sure about how to get there, but I think the best place we could end up is with some trustworthy bodies acting as intermediaries between companies who have products & services to advertise and the consuming audience. Some ideas about how this might work: 1) Take some small cut of commerce from would-be advertisers and/or subscribers. Use a not-for-profit model. 2) Provide curated searchable catalogs with aggregated subscriber feedback, 3rd party and internal reviews. Subscribers drive the discovery, and aren't indiscriminately sold to when they're not interested in buying. 3) Maintain some secondary and unobtrusive method(s) of random discovery, i.e. trending products, latest additions, or true-random exposure in some limited format to help underdogs and potential new markets get traction. 4) Help subscribers discriminate by disclosing which products/services are themselves advertising-subsidized and what their overall funding model looks like whenever possible. (Generally, help subscribers know who they're dealing with.) It almost sounds like Amazon or a similar web store with important differences being they don't engage in advertising products themselves and they don't have a profit motive so much as solvency. If such an organization were to be democratically controlled by its subscribership that might also prove to be a good thing. As for the Why of supplanting advertising as we know it, if that's not something clear: 1) The coupling of content/speech to advertising interests has bad effects on the trustworthiness of the content. It's a corrupting force. 2) Advertisements are wasteful of time (and money), and low on useful information. The targeting is awful and not voluntary or transparent. I like to think of ads as wasting mental space, though that's not a real quantifiable thing by any means I know of. 3) They incentivize some of the worst microeconomic behaviors and general human qualities (which have macro scale effects in aggregate) and do it through exploitative means, using psychology against people.

122 points by jbegley 8y ago

>Fixing that would require cultural and political reform in Silicon Valley and around the world, but it’s our only choice. Otherwise we’ll all end up on the bot internet of fake people, fake clicks, fake sites, and fake computers, where the only real thing is the ads. The proposed solution, when it originates outside of Silicon Valley, is always a Shakedown, and “Only” a Shakedown.

diegoperini 8y ago
What is Shakedown?
- pvarangot 8y ago
  It's when something is taken by extortion or by making threats, usually in a subtle but still aggressive style. Think mob protection rackets or shady loan repayment stuff.
  - creaghpatr 8y ago
    Yeah, in this case it refers to people begging for the government to step in and make the bad people hurt until the problem goes away.
    - anigbrowl 8y ago
      If people perceive a problem is getting worse, what else so you suggest? People expect government to step in because they wish it to function as the conduit of the public interest, however inefficient. The market is clearly not doing a good job of regulating itself, so what other proposals should people consider?
orcdork 8y ago
And the only response, coming from inside silicon valley, is always a callous disregard for anything that might impact that precious financial bottom line.
CM30 8y ago
I definitely have some sympathy here. Always feared that the fake news hysteria and bot farm panics and what not seemed like they were leading up to a potential crackdown on alternative news sources, sites and services. That any attempt to crack down on fake news will basically take out dozens (or hundreds/thousands) of legitimate alternate sites in the crossfire.

Balgair 8y ago

"My favorite statistic this year was Facebook’s claim that 75 million people watched at least a minute of Facebook Watch videos every day — though, as Facebook admitted, the 60 seconds in that one minute didn’t need to be watched consecutively. Real videos, real people, fake minutes." With all the recent news [0] coming out around FB and their practices, I've only one thing to say now: I knew they were evil, but I didn't think they were stupid too. [0] 'fake', who knows after this article?

agumonkey 8y ago
I tend to consider internet measures to be 0.1% of real world measures anyway. You don't perceive, think, feel the same when you went out to see something in the flesh. If you divide internet time by the ratio of ADD in each user at the time you get epsilon
ghostbrainalpha 8y ago
That's a good point, but I think many of these videos only require 5 seconds to really get the point. If Facebook wants to say I watched 1 minute of videos and its because they saw me stop scrolling and continuously digest a couple seconds of some buzzfeed video that is fine with me and I would think is honest. But if their calculations includes videos that I "watched" for 1 second or less than 1 second, and didn't even pause my scrolling.... that is pretty wretched.
- reaperducer 8y ago
  But if their calculations includes videos that I "watched" for 1 second or less than 1 second, and didn't even pause my scrolling.... that is pretty wretched. Worse, they count videos that auto-played on the page after you scrolled, then walked away from the computer to get a beverage.
nkurz 8y ago
I didn't really understand this criticism. If one were to say that American's on average watch almost 4 hours of television per day[1], is it at all misleading that this might not be done in a solid block? All the other criticisms aside, I'm just fine with saying "1 minute per day" even if this involves several short videos. [1] Yes, this actually is the correct figure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_consumption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_consumption. 3 hr 58 min per day; 35.5 hr per week; 77 days per year. And if you are thinking to yourself "Well I don't watch any!", remember that this just means someone else is watching twice the average to make up the difference.

floren 8y ago

> Political arguments now involve trading accusations of “virtue signaling” — the idea that liberals are faking their politics for social reward — against charges of being Russian bots. I particularly enjoyed this sentence coming as it did after the following: > If a Russian troll using a Brazilian man’s photograph to masquerade as an American Trump supporter watches a video on Facebook, is that view “real”? > Next time Russians want to puppeteer a group of invented Americans on Facebook, they won’t even need to steal photos of real people

claudiawerner 8y ago
What always gets me about the concept of 'virtue signalling' is that it seems to imply that the virtuous opinion is not sincerely held, because if 'virtue signalling' were to include sincerely held opinions, any statement on a moral issue made to multiple others counts as 'virtue signalling', and suddenly the concept isn't useful any more. For instance, if I say "murder is wrong", does this count as virtue signalling? Should it only count if I secretly believe murder is right? Alternatively, virtue signalling refers to showing off our sincerely held beliefs to gain social credit, but I don't see why that would be bad either; we do many things (like make friends and show our accomplishments) to gain social credit, so why should voicing our opinions (with the effect of having like-minded people befriend you) be such an action to deserve the derision it gets? It seems that "virtue signalling" is a very flimsy accusation; it is to say "you're lying, since nobody could possibly hold such a kind position sincerely". Maybe it's even an effect of an age in which we're so cynical that we expect anyone who holds a kind opinion to be acting insincerely. The answer to accusation of virtue signalling should always be this simple: show evidence that I don't sincerely hold the opinion, then you might be onto something and we can start talking about social credit and instrumental rationality. Until then, an accusation of virtue signalling is as substantive as saying unicorns are real.
- xamuel 8y ago
  I always interpreted virtue signalling not as implying insincerity, but rather implying the main reason they're broadcasting the belief is to put a spotlight on themselves. If there was a murder in the news and you immediately went on Facebook to post "Murder is bad" so people would Like your post, that's virtue signalling. Of course murder is bad. Only a crazy person would think murder wasn't bad. So there's no point posting that opinion on your feed, unless your goal is to get Likes. A less silly example might be if an acquaintance posts a picture of themselves at a restaurant and you post an unsolicited reply saying "I would never eat that, I'm a vegan." Ok, maybe you really are a vegan, but you're just posting that to look morally superior.

alexandernst 8y ago

I read somewhere that 90% of the internet is porn. If that is correct, then at least 90% of the internet is fake. (because you don't really believe that that pizza guy actually made that beauty fall in love with him, right?)

alexandernst 8y ago
So much down votes... Why people in HN don't have any sense of humor?
- smolder 8y ago
  There are lots of internet forums where jokes are king, not many where consistently high quality discourse is. Then there's the subjectivity of humor, and the question of novelty of a joke about the internet being mostly porn in this internet-centric audience... :)
- anigbrowl 8y ago
  Perhaps you overestimated your comedic ability.
Phenomenit 8y ago
Leaves 5% then.

jolmg 8y ago

> A recent academic paper from researchers at the graphics-card company Nvidia demonstrates a similar technique used to create images of computer-generated “human” faces that look shockingly like photographs of real people. (Next time Russians want to puppeteer a group of invented Americans on Facebook, they won’t even need to steal photos of real people.) Here's the HN discussion about that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18761907 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18761907

rossdavidh 8y ago

Hypothesis: most of advertising has always been fake. The subscription numbers of newspapers did not equal the number of people seeing your ad, and even if they did see it they probably didn't pay much attention. The 70's TV-watcher would use the commercial break to go to the restroom. People listening to a 30's radio serial would talk to each other about it during the ad, I bet. Anything driven by ads, is inherently going to be mostly fake, since it is not usually information that the user wants, but you're trying to convince the user that they want it. Which is easier, forcing the user to pay attention to the ad, or convincing the person paying for the ad, that it happened when it did not? The latter will always be easier.

rossdavidh 8y ago
I have given this hypothesis about 2 minutes' thought, so it could be wrong, of course.
coffeefirst 8y ago
Yes and no. TV audiences were measured through surveys. You have margins of error and some percentage of viewers going to the bathroom, but by and large, you were paying for placement in a show with 500k viewers. Some of them wouldn't see it, but you're getting what you paid for. The rampant fraud we're talking about involves making a fake website (or taking a real one and hot-swapping its ad code) pointing a farm of devices at it and tricking the analytics services AND the buyers into thinking they were put in front of the audience of 500k people, give or take, when 0 of them are human. The only way a scam like this works is because the ads are sold by robots, bought by robots, and measured by robots in lots of small batches, so a person can't just look at the site on their laptop and confirm that their ads are running even if they wanted to.
- DrScump 8y ago
  TV audiences were measured through surveys. ... and live metering services like Nielsen, who installed their own metering hardware in participating households' TVs and VCRs and polled them daily over a dedicated phone line.
8y ago

livueta 8y ago

> What’s gone from the internet, after all, isn’t “truth,” but trust: the sense that the people and things we encounter are what they represent themselves to be. I wonder if attitudes towards trusting content on the internet are partially a generational thing. Frankly, the idea that "trust" ever really existed on the internet (post very early days, anyway) strikes me as slightly absurd. Having gotten online in the late 90s/early 2000s, my default position, augmented by countless stranger-danger-type warnings from parents and teachers and slightly tongue-in-cheek disclaimers on websites[1], was that everything was bullshit until proven otherwise. I don't want to sound too sanctimonious, but that sort of skeptical attitude is a good defense against being taken in. In contrast, I've (totally anecdotally) seen older age cohorts and/or people who just ended up online later for whatever reasons develop much more relaxed, trusting attitudes towards internet content. The stereotypical boomer aunt for whom Facebook is the internet tends to be much less suspicious of content they see, as, after all, it's being posted by their real life friends! Why would one's real life friends go on the internet and tell lies? This is as good a place as any to plug my pet theory that real-name policies are actively harmful, as they incorrectly imply trust where none should exist. This dynamic, coupled with attitudes towards media outlets tuned by eras in which there were only a handful of (generally) credible outlets, seems to be a recipe for complete credulousness when transplanted into a low-trust medium like the internet. So, rather than a redefining of the essential qualities of the internet, what seems to be in the offing is a general recalibration away from overly-trusting models of thought among segments of the population who never really developed the sort of awareness that I'd argue is necessary for not ending up as a total dupe. Of course, the article's points on _why_ a lot of fake content exists totally stand - profit motive is a massive driver of that sort of behavior, and I genuinely hope that the ad model crumbles under the weight of its own depravity. --- [1] "The stories and information posted here are artistic works of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."

smolder 8y ago

I like to think about ways we might disrupt traditional advertising models. I am not too sure about how to get there, but I think the best place we could end up is with some trustworthy bodies acting as intermediaries between companies who have products & services to advertise and the consuming audience. Some ideas about how this might work: 1) Take some small cut of commerce from would-be advertisers and/or subscribers. Use a not-for-profit model. 2) Provide curated searchable catalogs with aggregated subscriber feedback, 3rd party and internal reviews. Subscribers drive the discovery, and aren't indiscriminately sold to when they're not interested in buying. 3) Maintain some secondary and unobtrusive method(s) of random discovery, i.e. trending products, latest additions, or true-random exposure in some limited format to help underdogs and potential new markets get traction. 4) Help subscribers discriminate by disclosing which products/services are themselves advertising-subsidized and what their overall funding model looks like whenever possible. (Generally, help subscribers know who they're dealing with.) It almost sounds like Amazon or a similar web store with important differences being they don't engage in advertising products themselves and they don't have a profit motive so much as solvency. If such an organization were to be democratically controlled by its subscribership that might also prove to be a good thing. As for the Why of supplanting advertising as we know it, if that's not something clear: 1) The coupling of content/speech to advertising interests has bad effects on the trustworthiness of the content. It's a corrupting force. 2) Advertisements are wasteful of time (and money), and low on useful information. The targeting is awful and not voluntary or transparent. I like to think of ads as wasting mental space, though that's not a real quantifiable thing by any means I know of. 3) They incentivize some of the worst microeconomic behaviors and general human qualities (which have macro scale effects in aggregate) and do it through exploitative means, using psychology against people.