Given bots’ recent dominance over the internet, Zuckerberg himself will soon have to prove that he is not actually a robot. In 2022 Human Beings accounted for only 52.6% of all traffic and engagements on the internet, down from 57.7% in 2021.
The remaining 47.4%… is conducted by ‘bots’ and automation. The recent Imperva Report broke down the difference between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ bots noting that even the good bots can have ulterior motives, like artificially boosting website visit analytics.
Bad bots account for 30.2% of all web traffic, used to target company websites and sometimes shut them down, steal sensitive data and gain illegal access to user accounts. For some reason, the U.S. seems to be uniquely attractive to these bad bots; American websites are the target of 41.8% of global bad bot traffic; the next highest country is Australia at 16.4% with no other country above 7%. Gaming (58.7%) and Telecommunications (47.7%) had the highest proportion of bad bot traffic on their websites and applications.
One real world impact of this might be Taylor Swift’s $700 per seat average ticket cost. As Bots are used to buy up popular event tickets, which can then be resold (scalped) at higher prices than people would pay if they could have gotten access to the sales sites directly.
The paper doesn’t offer any broad solutions, but it does warn that all of us are increasingly at risk of having our identities filched by non-human agents, which increasingly means “don’t believe everything you see online”.
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