You're falsely presenting theory as fact, as is quite common in psychological/psychiatric discussions; social and environmental factors seem to have very strong effects/influences as well.
>It's very easy to demonise Google and think they stand to benefit from this all, but in reality they are hurt by it as much as anyone else
False if bot traffic > estimated bot traffic
For others like FB and Twitter, it's a fact their active user counts are inflated by bots and that they are disincentivized to accurately account for it.
This article and research is talking about third party advertising, where an ad network is used to serve ads on third party sites (greatly simplified, as in reality there could be lots of other players in the chain)
What you're talking about is a completely different scenario, where the publisher is also the ad network (FB, Twitter) so inflated user activity could be beneficial for them. That's also arguable as they provide excellent metrics and different pricing models (CPM, CPC, CPA) so if their numbers were as bad as you think more advertisers would just drop FAN.
In the case of 3ve, methbot and the like, the process for the fraudsters is different and has nothing to do with bots in social networks:
1. In online advertising, it's very difficult to know who is authorised to serve ads for a given domain. Some domains have hundreds of ad suppliers and they can change all the time. This is alleviated by ads.txt, an IAB initiative to list all your adtech partners in a machine-readable file on your web root.
2. Since it's hard to know what inventory a player in the middle of the chain really has access to. So you can make a deal with an ad player to serve ads on the new york times, but actually be delivering shit inventory. This happens a lot at a smaller scale with dodgy ad vendors that simply deliver lower quality inventory; and added to this, until recently there was no way of cryptographically signing bid requests on OpenRTB protocol (v3 adds this feature)
3. If you have access to lots of consumer IP addresses (3ve uses a large botnet) you can essentially create a hosts entry for publisher.com pointing to localhost, serve a site with fake content loaded with real ads, open a real browser to it and collect on the money from the partnerships and accounts you opened. The advertisers think they're buying real inventory and these users pass every check (browser, network...)
PS. I do understand the apprehension though, I spent 10 years in adtech and at times the ecosystem is a total clusterfuck, but it is slowly getting better.
In this day and age I would've expected any non-secured printer to be flooded by spam on a continuous basis, to the point where they have to be secured if you don't want them to run out of paper printing spam every single day.
I'm surprised that these companies managed to get by with non-secure printers without being overwhelmed by spam.
While that may be true in many cases the example of Iraq and WMDs is more nuanced than most realize. The CIA was not reaching the conclusions that the Bush administration wanted and so Bush and co. created the Office of Special plans in order to deliberately stovepipe (misinterpret) the intelligence.
Western countries are very much influenced by China.
>sharing it with the US or my own governments, which are there, and can make my life hell for any or no reason at all, and have the means to actually hurt me.
Given all of your personal private data, anyone around the world with a computer has the means to actually hurt you.
In terms of end result for the individual, what difference does it make if an internet mob blacklists you from employment for thoughtcrime or if a government bureaucracy does it?
I don't necessarily know if it's them being dumb. I've found that it's mostly "I don't do anything wrong, why should I care?" that gets bandied around as an excuse.
Because they think "it can't happen here". Or "I'd recognize Hitler if he was coming to power" type of thoughts. Probably because we only talk about evil people with respect to their evilness. And not how evil people can also do good things.
Newspapers already had sufficient scale to start major wars, prop up and/or tear down governments, etc. And, while we may blame those newspapers, should we also blame the companies that manufacture printing presses? Direct mail can be used for similar things; should we blame the USPS?
Despite your argument being a false analogy, a bit of a strawman, and a non sequitur -- many historians have indeed chronicled the violent societal effects of the invention of the printing press:
"The effect of the discovery of printing was evident in the savage religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Application of power to communication industries hastened the consolidation of vernaculars, the rise of nationalism, revolution, and new outbreaks of savagery in the twentieth century."
We do blame newspapers for starting wars though. At least we did back when they did so. We do hold the mainstream media as accountable for its actions.
You seem to be either (intentionally or for the sake of argument) excluding a lot of relevant context in your arguments to make Facebook look similar to a printing press.
