One aspect that shouldn't be lost - the implicit framing of the platforms being "under attack" by the bots is wrong - the bots are likely a net positive for the platforms - they're very much complicit with the fraud, or at least condone it. They sell views and clicks - if bots create more views and clicks, so be it. It's the advertisers who bear the cost.

Taking Facebook as an example:

Creating an account, linking Oculus Quest to it and leaving the account dormant - accounts locked en masse.

US account that logs in from Indonesian IPs, never posts anything, likes 5000 random things ranging from a shampoo to a cafe in a small Ohio town, to the new shirts of an Albanian soccer club - in Facebook's view that's a perfectly legitimate account.

The people bearing the real cost are the people trying to sell products with ads. Facebook more or less sets up the system to pass that cost along.

To be fair the cost of ads varies based on demand; advertisers wouldn't pay more than the ROI they're seeing from their ads, so the prices have the cost of ad fraud somewhat priced in?

Most marketing departments I've met don't check their ROI. They request budget, spend it on campaign, then make power points to tell the rest of the company that they were successful.

Dunno who you’ve worked with but in 2021 that’s patently false. Optimizing Facebook ad performance for ROAS is a precise science. Marketing budgets are heavily scrutinized and hard to defend precisely because of dismissive attitudes like this, so you better believe most marketers are working their tails off to measure and deliver ROI.

Maybe in the short term it works like that, but ultimately a platform's value comes from its real users. And bots make the platform less attractive to real users.

But Facebook, like most social media platforms, is addictive, so it is not obvious that in the long term a reasonable usage of them will emerge.

Lack of movement in sales after paying Facebook for advertisements will emerge, and that will certainly be noticed.

You may overestimate the sophistication of ad buyers, and underestimate the ability of Facebook to convince buyers that their ads are working

The increased ability to track the efficacy of ads is the value of the tracking that the internet enabled, hence the value of Facebook. Hampering this ability to match ads to purchases reduces the price these ads can be sold at, it is what the whole article and situation are talking about.

Movies make billions of dollars from users who don't contribute any content. As long as users consume content, who cares who makes it?

> I'm pretty sure if we all suddenly went offline, half the internet would seem to keep going as usual.

That could be a good Black Mirror like scifi movie, everyone dies but chatter and social media just keep living on.

"Did you guys see that amazing sunset last night? Check out this book to capture these amazing moments!"

"Can't wait to see the new [dystopian movie] this weekend!"

"Amazing shows to see this weekend. Download our event app to log on and find the fun!"

"The [other party] are a it again today... protests should be intense today at the capitol."

... no one there ...

I love these kinds of stories

> CGI 3D Animated Shorts : "LAST DAY OF WAR" - by Dima Fedotov https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjJmTeBSEzU

sounds a little like autofac by philip k dick[1]. there's an electric dreams episode about it, ironically streaming on amazon[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autofac

[2] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6902176/

> I'm pretty sure if we all suddenly went offline, half the internet would seem to keep going as usual.

Seems like a reasonable estimate if half the internet is porn.

There's a name for this: The Dead Internet theory[0]

It postulates that the majority of the "organic" content is actually generated by bots, and the number of human interactions online is a tiny subset. We are all wandering unknowingly through a wasteland haunted by robot ghosts.

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/08/dead-...

In this case at least the article implies this not to be true, one of the interviewed ceos said he used to generate 80% of his revenue from Facebook ad buys and now it’s only 20%. This would imply he’s getting his ads in front of real people.

Beep beep boop boop. I regular person, like your comment!

There are massive bot farms that watch videos, click on ads, sometimes even do a download of the app after clicking and open the app. I've sometimes thought Google could cut out the middleman and just allow creators to outright buy 'views' on YouTube. You could pay like $100 to get 10,000 additional views which would translate to some additional ad revenue, which ad companies would know is inflated so they would discount the rates appropriately and no money would need to be sent to bot farms. This would also be far greener and need less servers and bandwidth and would be an overall win-win.

It's one thing to read about the click farms, but nothing can prepare one to actually see the videos of them in action - just visceral. It has an eerie Matrix-like feeling to it.

13 sec video of a Chinese click farm (quite loud):

https://twitter.com/mbrennanchina/status/1072114511212109824

10 sec - thousands of phones (not loud):

https://twitter.com/mbrennanchina/status/1148447866366464000

And the scene from Silicon Valley

That is laughably sad. I've been depressed, but for some reason started to laugh.

This has been since what feels like forever. Once a couple of people I worked with found and penetrated one of these "click farms". We saw all the stats, the number where impressive.

I had a private contact within google's SRE team and spilled all the beans, ask where I should dump the information within google. The answer was as blunt as telling: no one would be interested since it would hurt their bottom line.

Tried to inform a couple of Googlies at different cons in the months following: as much as they liked the tricks we pulled to get in, as little did they want to bring the subject up in their teams.

Clicks are Google's Crack.

But what about the workers. It's likely that those working at the bot farms aren't wealthy, and that they're from less wealthy countries. So this is good, addressing the immediate problem of energy waste, but doesn't address the underlying problem of wealth inequality that - in general - drives people to work on systems to rip others off.

Those who run the bot farms will find other scummy work, and no end of desperate workers.

It makes sense. If that happened, who would lose in the short term?