Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - F is for Fake

Episode Date: February 11, 2014

To Bot or Not? That’s the big question for Data Scientist Gilad Lotan. His research suggests we may be damaging our online reputations if we choose not to play the fake follower game.��Jason Q Ng, author of the book Blocked on Weibo, tells us why the Chinese government hates fake bots and why they targeted Black PR companies last summer. And your host imagines a future were humans are forced to shower their new Bot Overlords with unwavering attention. *********Click on the image for the whole story about this week’s installment**********      

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. You are listening to Benjamin Walker's theory of everything. This installment is called F is for Fake. As a data scientist, Gilad Lotan spends most of his time measuring stuff. The popularity of online blog posts, the virality of memes, the import of Facebook likes. Lately, he's been investigating Twitter followers. Who are these people? Are they authorities or not? How important are they? Are they real or not? This, of course, is the big

question. Are they real or not has become quite an important thing to gauge over the past few years, because as these spaces become so popular, as people's attention has sort of focused on these spaces, there have been obviously many folks who have been trying to game the system. It's really easy to game Twitter. We're talking dollars for followers. You literally pay whatever dollar amount you pay, and the next day you have that number of followers. A couple of months ago, Gilad decided to buy some followers. He dropped five bucks. I ran an experiment. I bought 4,000 followers and then I ran another

experiment and bought another 4,000 followers. So raised my followers by a significant amount. Now maybe you're one of those people who spends hours and hours a day on Twitter. Counting the number of followers you have and comparing that number with the number of followers your friends and colleagues and enemies have. If you are one of these people, then sure, you might notice when someone like Gilad overnight gains 8,000 new followers. But just so you know, the number of people who actually might notice something like this is tiny, minuscule. It's like you and five other people.

I think that it's not common for most people on these networks to know that bots are sort of commonly purchased. I feel like it's not really known. This is what actually happens after you buy 8,000 new Twitter followers. Like people look at your account and they, the first reaction or first kind of response is, oh, you know, they have 10,000 followers. It's not bad. People see that you have a certain amount of followers. They are more likely to follow you then because you seem more real or more popular or interesting. So with 8,000 plus followers, you become more popular and more real in the eyes of the flesh and blood people who are now scoping you out. But all the bots that are also on the network, they see you now the same way.

More popular, more real. Algorithms across the web, across different services are looking at you differently. So, for example, if you cared about a service called Clout, which tries to measure and gauge your influence online, you would see that your Clout have a partnership, and Bing, the search engine, now highlights content from people with higher Clout score, it sort of pushes it up when people search on Bing, then now because you have a higher Clout score, you'll be much higher on Bing search results. So it does work. Buying fake followers on Twitter will get you more followers faster, more real followers faster, and give you the validity that you may want.

So I saw Gilad give a talk about this research. He called his lecture to bot or not. I'll put a link to the video on the Theory of Everything page. And while this idea that fake bots will enhance your online status might sound kind of obvious, the converse is also true. People who don't buy fake followers can damage their online reputations. If you're a marketer that has no followers, there's something wrong there, right? If you're a musician, an artist, people who expect you to have a following, and if you don't on these spaces, then that's a problem. So through my research, I was trying to observe who tends to buy followers, and many of these accounts are people who need to have an audience, right,

in order to look valid. All the musicians, artists, journalists, book critics, and pundits who are out there buying fake followers understand that Twitter is a rigged game. It's like if you're going to compete in a wrestling match and you find out that every single player you'll be going up against is using performance-enhancing drugs. Well, if you don't want to lose, then what are you going to do?

Maybe a few years ago, we would have had this conversation. You would say, well, I don't really need to do keyword optimization for my website because that's kind of cheating. I'm not going to put all these words that aren't truly 100% relevant. Like I'll just put the ones that are like the real me or the real website and And you know the people who want to come will come Now nobody nobody would say that you would say okay I'll put as many keywords as possible even if they're you know tangential to what I'm blogging about or what I'm writing about my website just because it's traffic and You know if people come if they don't like the content they'll go away, but I'll get traffic and that's good.

So I feel like that's almost exactly the same thing, only we're talking about status of sort of the way profiles look like and sort of dressing up people online versus a website. Now that attention has become the only currency that matters online, it does seem likely that more and more people will turn to botting. And come on, you can buy like an entire legion for pennies. Here's the way I see it. If we are going to be judged by algorithms,

it's better to show up with 900,000 plus friends, fans, and followers. And Gilad Lotan's research backs me up on this. If you're struggling with very few followers, it's very hard, especially when these networks are so saturated with people and celebrities, it's hard to get attention, and it's hard to sort of move up the ranks in these networks. So I would say that buying followers inherently isn't harmful to your profile, but rather it may give you a better standing when people look at you and when

algorithms look at you. And that's as crazy as it may sound. And as opposed to the idea that I am, I think it think the fake bots are going away anytime soon, unless our government starts acting like China. In the summer of 2013, China cracked down on Weibo, its version of Twitter. 500 retweets or 5,000 shares of an offensive comment, a rumor, or anything the government doesn't like can now lead to a serious fine or jail time. Of course, these laws were mainly designed to stifle online dissent and check the power of Weibo's big V celebrity verified users. But you could make the case that these laws were also aimed at all the fake bots that thrive on Weibo.

Even though there are 600 million registered accounts on Weibo, there's only really about 50 million active users per month. So in many ways, it's been overrun by these sort of zombie accounts. Jason Q. Ning studies online surveillance and censorship at the Citizens Lab at the University of Toronto. He says there's lots of evidence that after the crackdown, traffic on Weibo tanked. So just recently, the Daily Telegraph published this fascinating data dive into the number of users on Weibo in association with East China Normal University. And basically what they were doing was tracking how many posts actually are taking discussion on Weibo just plummeted.

And this data fits in with the numbers that have been coming out of Weibo itself, saying that the growth has slowed down. And just based on personal experience, both from myself and others, there's really not as much interesting discussion happening on Weibo. Jason Ning's been researching

how Chinese internet companies comply with Chinese internet law. In 2013, the new press published his book, Blocked on Weibo. There's a lot of ways that information can be controlled on Weibo, not necessarily censorship. In many ways, there are more subtle ways of nudging users to staying within the line. So obviously, there is the overt, really obvious censorship. Like if you post a message saying of down with the Chinese Communist Party, that message, if it does get posted at all, it's going to get reviewed and flagged very quickly by

this computer system, these algorithms that they have set up to find sensitive content. And it's going to get reviewed by a human sensor and it'll get deleted. Sometimes if your message contains too many sensitive keywords, it'll actually be held for review. It may never see the light of day. Sometimes your message may appear to be posted, but in fact, it's actually made invisible. So only you could see it and users who are visiting your microblog site won't see it. So that's some of that very obvious stuff. And the book that I wrote primarily tries to uncover the words that you can't search for. So if you search for specific keywords, no information will come back to you. And it'll basically give you an error message saying, according to regulations and laws,

we can't show you the search results for this. Many of the blocked on Weibo keywords in Jason's book are kind of obvious. Stuff like Tiananmen Square, Falun Gong, constitutional democracy. But some of these are totally bizarre, like... Mao lao, which means literally hairy bacon or hair bacon or sausage. Basically, the Mao means hair and the lao means like preserved meat. Eventually, I figured out that Mao doesn't just mean hair. It represents something else, a different Mao, Mao Zedong. And lao isn't just meat that you eat, but also a different sort of preserved meat, which is in fact his body, which is laid

in state in Tiananmen Square. So this is a coded insult for Mao Zedong. So the fact that the company decided that they needed to censor this, even though this keyword wasn't widely known. Gets at how these blacklists are so customized and really involve people building them. The censors who work at Chinese companies like Weibo don't really have a government handbook that tells them which words to block. But post-crackdown, many of these companies now block keywords simply because they're in danger of going viral. One was connected to this woman, this CCTV anchor, this China Central Television broadcast anchor, who was in a video segment where her bra strap was exposed for a brief moment. And suddenly this was captured in a tabloid and it was circulated online.

But it was such an obscure thing that clearly isn't related to riots and protests in the streets. And yet that keyword, the fact that her underwear was exposed was one of the keywords. So again, it relates to the fact that individual companies themselves are crafting these sorts of keyword lists. And oftentimes they look at these sorts of edge cases as things that they don't want to even touch, so they add more, they over-censor. But it's not just underwear that inflames the passion of Chinese netizens. Rumors and fake stories also give birth to flash mobs.

The country is still reeling from a rumor that spread in 2011, all because this Weibo user, a girl named Guoi Mei, claimed she worked at the Red Cross. The Chinese netizens called her wealth-flaunting girl. She was posting images of her with her Hermes handbags and her Maserati car. And Weibo users just went up in arms about this because of the fact that charity in China doesn't really have great oversight, doesn't really have a great reputation. All of a sudden, there's a woman who's flaunting her wealth and saying she's connected to the Red Cross. So because of Guaomei Mei, the Red Cross saw a 60% decrease in donations. And this is why the search term rich woman is blocked on Weibo.

Now, in China, if you want to purchase a bunch of fake followers to big up your profile or like your music or brand, you turn to a black PR company. These are the guys in charge of the zombie networks and water armies. And here's where it gets really interesting, because last summer, as part of the crackdown, the Chinese government went after these black PR companies. They actually arrested two men who worked at one of these firms called the Beijing Irma Interactive Marketing and Planning Company. They were accused of using their bot armies to push out false information and blackmail.

I came across a few really wild rumors about these guys. One of the rumors that actually came out was that the Guomei thing was completely engineered by this so-called black PR company. But the idea that this black PR company created the Guomei story simply to advertise its marketing capabilities is a bit much for Jason Ning. He says the government loves rumors like this one because it justifies their crackdown and the new draconian internet laws. The loose regulations online really allow this sort of thing to happen. And it also gives credence to the notion that the government

really should be controlling the internet more. Now, I should point out here that as much as Weibo's owners would like to blame the government crackdown for their plummeting traffic, there is another factor. Remember what happened to MySpace back when everyone got excited about Facebook? Well, this is exactly what's going on right now in China, with a new social media application called WeChat. People are fleeing Weibo in droves for WeChat. Of course, some of this is related to the crackdown, because while the new laws apply to WeChat, they are sort of meaningless. Because on WeChat, people congregate in small groups of friends.

It's not a giant public-facing platform like Weibo. So there's no point in having a bot army. There's also no potential for a massive gathering. Everyone is siloed off. It's like comparing New York's Central Park to the High Line, the narrow walkway that runs along the Hudson River in Chelsea. I can assure you the cops will never have to shut down a protest on the High Line. But while there is no real censorship to speak of on WeChat,

there is surveillance. This is, after all, a Chinese company. But is there an app out there that doesn't surveil its users? I have to say I've become a fan of WeChat. You can send voice messages instead of text messages. Of course I like that. If you're a fan of WeChat, you can send voice messages instead of text messages. Of course I like that. If you're on WeChat, you can send me one if you'd like.

I'm at bwalkernyc. I discovered WeChat because a few months ago I got a very strange email. It was in Chinese, English, and emoji. None of my Chinese friends could make sense of it, though, so I used Google Translate. While this email never addresses me by name, there are tons of references to my SoundCloud page. This is where I keep most of my radio programs and podcasts. You can find me there if you want. I'm B Walker. Anyways, the folks who wrote me this letter seem to think that I was some

big time podcaster because they kept calling me supreme podcaster. Now on SoundCloud, I have a ton of fake followers. I don't know how this happened or why, but every day a few hundred more show up. As of now, it's over 900,000. My thinking is that these folks who wrote me this email happened across my SoundCloud page and, impressed by my 900,000-plus listeners, decided they would offer to pay me, Supreme Podcaster, Supreme Dollar, if I would help them. But there was a problem.

It was impossible to gauge who these folks were or what they wanted from me. At first, I thought the email might be from this company, WeChat, the app I was just telling you about, because there are lots of references to WeChat and explanations of how to sign up. But there's also a bunch of really bizarre emoji, like this guy in a suit holding a phone with WeChat on the screen, jumping up and down on top of a pile of money. And then next to this pile of money, a dancing mutant frog person gesturing, come hither. And then next to the frog, there's this policeman asleep on a computer. There are Zs coming out of his head, and on the computer screen, there's the logo to my podcast. I thought perhaps

if I signed up for WeChat, then someone would leave me a voicemail instructing me of what I had to do in order to collect my supreme dollar. But, well, nothing. Yet. Anyways, I never responded to this email because, as I was trying to make sense of it, I got a call from Roman Mars. He hosts the insanely popular podcast 99% Invisible, and he invited me to join a new collective of the best story-driven podcasts on the internet. We're calling it Radiotopia. I guess my 900,000 plus fake followers impressed him too. A couple of weeks ago, I had a really intense dream. In my dream, a supercomputer of vast intelligence decided to make all the fake bots on the internet real. With one single line of code, millions and millions of digital Pinocchios were transformed.

And overnight, the balance of power shifted. Humans were now conscripted to aggregate on behalf of their new bot overlords. Every utterance had to be liked, favorited, and amplified on the pain of death. Well, I fled to the mountains, grew a beard, and lived on kale, but there was no escape. Eventually, I was hunted down, captured, and sold. But my new master was not an ordinary bot. My master was convinced that quality trumps quantity, and he wanted to conduct an experiment using me

in order to prove this. He ditched his human flesh army, and I became his sole follower. I never liked or favorited or retweeted my master. Instead, I would compose an original thoughtful response appropriate to each and every social media application that he used. On Twitter, I amplified the subtleties embedded in his subtweets. On Instagram, I became his gallerist. On WeChat, I composed personal voice messages.

And on Snapchat, I danced the seven veils for my master 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The experiment worked. My master was showered with attention, and all of the other bots began to shed their vassals as well. Inadvertently, I had saved mankind. I awoke from this dream with an idea. Sure, you can buy 8,000 follower bots for five bucks. But what about one real dedicated apostle?

Someone who will make sure everything you put online is noticed, seen, and felt. What might someone pay for that? I thought about dropping this podcast and starting a startup, but then, like I said, I got that call from Roman Mars and the invitation to join Radiotopia. But perhaps you're interested in that sort of thing. Well, you can find me on Twitter. I'm at Benjamin Walker, and that's B-E-N-J-A-M-E-N. Why? Well, when I was about 12 years old, I asked my mother that same question, and she replied, isn't that the way it's spelled? Well, that's it for this episode. It was produced by myself, Benjamin Walker, and Bill Bowen did the sound.

It featured Gilad Lotan and Jason Q. Ning. Radiotopia from PRX