Reddit’s Ellen Pao says ‘it’s all true, everything is fake’: Internet traffic, political memes, Facebook, YouTube…all of it
“It’s all true: Everything is fake,” tweeted Former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao regarding a Wednesday New York Magazine article which reveals that internet traffic metrics from some of the largest tech companies are overstated or fabricated.
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.
In October, small advertisers filed suit against Facebook, accusing it of covering up, for a year, its significant overstatements of the time users spent watching videos on the platform (by 60 to 80 percent, Facebook says; by 150 to 900 percent, the plaintiffs say).
Over at YouTube, the business of buying and selling video views is “flourishing,” as the Times reminded readers with a lengthy investigation in August.
The Atlantic reports that non-CGI human influencers are posting fake sponsored content — that is, content meant to look like content that is meant to look authentic, for free — to attract attention from brand reps, who, they hope, will pay them real money.
“It’s all true: Everything is fake,” tweeted Pao, adding “Also mobile user counts are fake. No one has figured out how to count logged-out mobile users, as I learned at reddit. Every time someone switches cell towers, it looks like another user and inflates company user metrics.”
It’s all true: Everything is fake. Also mobile user counts are fake. No one has figured out how to count logged-out mobile users, as I learned at reddit. Every time someone switches cell towers, it looks like another user and inflates company user metrics https://t.co/tk1PKuvLL6
— Ellen K. Pao (@ekp) December 27, 2018
And if an unlogged-in user uses the site on multiple devices, each device counts as a unique user
— Ellen K. Pao (@ekp) December 27, 2018
The New York Magazine article ends with this proclamation; “The people are fake” , “The businesses are fake” , “The content is fake” , “Our politics are fake,” and finally “We ourselves are fake.”
From our experience at the Dispatch: Facebook has bogus numbers, real time Google traffic doesn’t add up to days’ totals, real life activity isn’t always captured on these metrics and don’t get me started on other social media sites like Twitter and Instagram.
Fake?
So much so that reality gets lost in the shuffle.
My observations is that the larger the company, the LESS you can believe them. Trump’s use of FAKE NEWS has hurt real honest fact checking of these sites which no longer link to sources, hold any of their staff accountable and will run ANYTHING FIRST because the populace doesn’t care about the retractions.
Google page rankings, Facebook insights and other metrics have NOT worked correctly in years. Ambiguous bounce rates, bots and crawlers have now been combined with faceless algorithms to “track Internet traffic” and content, but it’s just NOT accurate.
Welcome to the REAL WORLD NEO!