Do Users Dream of Electric Sheep?
By: Tobias Batton
Tags: Artificial Intelligence, Fake News, Cognitive Science, Advertising, Fraud Detection

Fake users, fake friends and fake news. How the digital ecosystem is being manipulated to game and drain you.

Humans have been counting things since we were able to stand upright and look at the sky. First, it was the stars, then it was our crops we so industriously grew at the inception of civilization. The developing discipline of mathematics told humans how tall, how long and how valuable something was. There are stories in the old testament of the bible that deal with King David taking a census. Counting is as biblical as it is scientific. In the information age, we’re still obsessed with measuring but now we count users, follows, likes, upvotes and retweets. The digital reality isn’t “real” in the sense that you can eat it, spend it or keep it. Despite this we still want higher counts, bigger numbers and more of everything. These bigger numbers let us know we are valuable, safe and that in a sense, we are winning.

When a friend tells you how many followers they have, or when you read that a popular social media network has a high user count you automatically think of people. After all, “users” are the source of all those likes, follows and retweets. In reality, no one really knows whats happening on the other side of the screen. Have you ever made an extra Facebook or Twitter account? Perhaps you lost your Amazon login so you just signed up again. Does that mean you are now two people? All you need to make more users are more emails, phone numbers, IP addresses or possibly even credit card numbers. For the motivated, none of those things are hard or expensive to get.

Michael likes your social media posts and follows you . . . for a small fee.

As consumers, there are only a handful of digital platforms that billions of people(?) interact with everyday. Lets have a role call: Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Twitter, The Appstore, Google Play Store, Amazon, Reddit, Snapchat and maybe one or two others that I am forgetting. Obviously that is a western list, but will serve just fine for this story. These online destinations have become the digital thoroughfares, markets and public squares of the 21st century where people socialize, advertise, trade and even campaign for office. When we engage with these platforms all of the users, likes, follows, retweets, reviews, ratings, sales, installs, posts, comments and memes tell us what to buy, what to watch, who to follow, who to vote for and even our own personal estimate of social worth. It is important then, to understand if information we are being presented with is authentic.

Beats flipping burgers I guess.

According to this Vox article, Facebook had to remove over 2 billion fake accounts from its service recently. These articles explore how the millions of fake accounts on Twitter have essentially ruined the service by transforming it into a propaganda rag. Amazon has been plagued with fake ratings and reviews for years to inauthentically increase consumer confidence in the products sold on its “shelves”. Reddit is reportedly and constantly gamed by sophisticated bots to control the front page and influence opinions. To see how Google and Apple’s store fronts are infested with fake users, ratings, reviews and installs just watch the “Today Show” video above.

Man and machine, a terrifying new world

You see, humans are herd animals. For hundreds of thousands of years we migrated with other pack animals to tend to a source of food and keep each other safe. Society has changed so much around us, but the instincts in our brains are mostly the same. When we see digital validation in the form of posts, likes, ratings, memes and follows, our brains tell us to follow along because thats the behavior that kept our ancestors fed, clothed and alive.

If you know me, you know I am an MMA fan. Its a guilty pleasure and my wife calls it my soap opera. She isn’t wrong. Interestingly, MMA has been struggling with its own brand of inauthenticity as a result of performance enhancing drugs. Many of the sport’s biggest stars and champions have tested positive for PEDs over the last several years bringing into question their legacy and all the fights that have resulted in a win. Nate Diaz said it best:

Nate gets to the point.

When you surf the web or engage with an app, its not a question of if, its a question of how much. Fake users and all the actions they spawn are everywhere. World governments and the largest trillion-dollar companies can’t stop it. When you see a post, video or item for sale with great reviews, comments and engagement, what thoughts go through your head? Are you more likely to click add, play or buy? Invest?

How Smart Phone Are Rewiring Our Brains

Thinking about thought is the mind’s mobius strip of meta self-reflection (Thanks Hofstadter). It is the kind of exercise that might drive a sane man crazy if you spend enough time there, but we have to. We live in a metaphorical Oz where ostensibly billions of wizards exist behind millions of curtains using inauthentic information to puppeteer your thoughts, emotions, motivations and perception of reality all in the name of views, popularity and profit.

Facial Recognition and Human Fingerprints

At this point, you may be thinking why not just verify a human is using the device considering most smartphones have some form of facial recognition and / or human fingerprint detection. Privacy rights issues aside, this is easy to fake. First off, fingerprints have been easy to fake for decades. If you haven’t had the chance read about new deep fake technology and how completely realistic humans faces, features and gestures can be completely manufactured.

Losing our grasp on reality

Wether you are a consumer, advertiser, venture capitalist or some other species of digital fauna, slow down and be critical, but you must take care:

“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. […] under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.” -Hannah Arendt

Let’s get weird

If a digital “user” is nothing more than the string of values that make up an IP address, email, phone number, credit card or social UID, then what does that say about humankind? In essence, that is what humans all are, the string of values stored in our DNA are the biological unique identifiers of us. When John Archibald Wheeler channeled Claude Shannon in his famous quote “It from bit” he was on to something. The basic building blocks of reality isn’t matter, it is information.

Its not hard to imagine an (un)reality in the near future. Who needs virtual or augmented worlds when 3d printed celebrity skins wrapped around bipedal life-like robots populate our streets. They’ll run advanced chatbot AI and even be counted towards viewership, participate in the economy and maybe even vote. Each one, of course, will have its own IP address, serial number and maybe even an email to verify its uniqueness and authenticity. Maybe once these bots spend money, advertisers will count their impressions. Its just around the corner.

What is it that makes something “authentic”?

Perhaps this is how humanity started. Could Bostrom, Descartes and Plato be right? Digital bits and bytes aren’t conceived by nature like our biological stuff, but instead the imagination of humans. We don’t know what we are doing. These new strings of information are the unintended mitochondrial building blocks of a new (un)reality. It is as though humankind’s curiosity and invention is dragging us forward faster and faster all the while tricking us into believing that we are at the helm. We aren’t.

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.” ― H.P. Lovecraft

We live in interesting times.

Life is a dream,

Tobias