One of the most complex and questionable topics of modern conspiracy theories is the question of real statistics of the world's population.
There is an opinion, for example, that the population of a number of countries is greatly overestimated for some reason, as evidenced by, for example, the cemeteries of megalopolises, where the inhabitants of the adjacent city who have died over the past 70 years will not fit, even if they are stacked on top of each other in multi-row stacks.
There is also an opinion from the field of the so-called hardcore conspiracy theories - that is, conspiracy theories, from the ideas of which even many conspiracy theorists will get their eyes on their foreheads. According to this hardcore theory, a fairly significant part of the world's population is a kind of simulation: that is, either characters generated by the computer that controls the world, or biorobots created by some aliens.
All these are very complex topics, on which mountains of materials have been written, so we will analyze all this gradually - as some strange facts proving conspiracy theories appear.
However, today, as a beginning of the process, we offer our readers the translation of materials from some completely non-conspiracy publications (such as New York Magazine), which, citing quotes from former high-ranking engineers and managers from various projects, say that at least half of the Internet traffic is not living people, but bots.
And if this is really true information (which, apparently, is exactly the case), the fact of the total domination of bots over users on the network becomes another indirect proof that virtual characters, in terms of their numbers, are likely to dominate other platforms as well. For example, in the real world.
According to knowledgeable people, all the global traffic that is happening before your eyes - from the number of your friends on Facebook to the number of Twitter subscribers - all this is fake, because in our age of the boom of social networks and global transformations, there is nothing left. that we can take real.
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"It really is: everything is fake, fake," former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao tweeted.
As an example from practice, Ellen cites the example of cell towers, which a user passes by and each of which sees him as a new visitor to the global Internet, which unimaginably inflates traffic.
At the same time, in order not to be unfounded, Ellen refers to an article in New York Magazine dated December 26, which says that the Internet traffic indicators of some of the largest technology companies are either grossly overstated or even fabricated.
NY Mag, referred to by Ellen, writes: “How many users on the network are fake? As a rule, studies show that from year to year less and less web traffic falls on real people, and lately, according to some researchers, bots are already the total majority on the Internet.
In 2013, The Times reported that for some period of time, half of YouTube's traffic was in the form of "bots masquerading as humans." This portion of the traffic was so high that YouTube employees themselves were afraid of an inflection point, after which YouTube's systems for detecting fake traffic would crash from a reboot.
How does this happen? This is a mystery to everyone.
Today, all global companies are well aware that the metric should be the most important and most real thing on the entire Internet, since it is at the heart of the advertising business. However, even Facebook, the world's largest personal data collection organization, seems unable to assess the credibility of its sources.
In October, small advertisers filed a class action lawsuit against the social media giant, accusing it of vastly exaggerating the time users spend watching videos on the platform. The plaintiffs claim that Facebook winds up to 900% of traffic, while Facebook itself says about … 60-80 percent. We emphasize that this is Facebook says that 80% of the markup is completely real and, as it were, official figures.
And having finished listing all such unthinkable examples, NY Mag summarizes: "People are fake", "Business is fake", "Content is fake", "Our policy is fake" and, finally, "We ourselves, too, seem to be fake."
Sequel to: Part 2: strange characters on the streets