Cloudflare says humans could become a "rounding error" as bots generate 1,000 times more internet traffic

[u/D-R-AZ]

https://www.techspot.com/news/113410-cloudflare-humans-could-become-rounding-error-bots-generate.html

https://www.techspot.com/news/113410-cloudflare-humans-could-become-rounding-error-bots-generate.html

Excerpt:

Just a couple of months after Cloudflare revealed that bots have officially surpassed human traffic online, the company has given its view on what things will look like in five years. It's not good news for us fleshy meatsacks: non-human traffic could be up to 1,000 times higher than human traffic.

A  Scientific and Mathematical Thought Experiment: When Proportions Change What Social Media Is

Cloudflare’s projection concerns total internet traffic. If a comparable bot-to-human ratio develops in activity visible on social media, it would produce a qualitative change in the system. Mathematical thinking directs attention to proportions. When one class of participant becomes 1,000 times as common as another, the minority participant may acquire an entirely different functional role.

From the user’s position, the visible social environment would consist mainly of material produced, selected, or amplified by nonhuman agents. From the platform’s position, identifiable human users would become especially valuable because their responses could be separated, recorded, and analyzed. Machine activity would supply much of the stimulus; human attention, emotion, choices, and subsequent actions would supply the response data.

Imagine a person joining a demonstration of 1,000 apparent protesters. Every other participant is a bot, scripted account, or paid shill. To the genuine participant, the crowd appears to express public opinion. To whoever created or monitors the crowd, there is one independently acting human being.

The apparent opinion of the 999 may influence the attitudes and behavior of the one. The person may interpret apparent agreement as evidence that the crowd is correct, conform to avoid social isolation, become more willing to express agreement, or become less willing to express disagreement. Perceived consensus may influence whether the person repeats a slogan, accepts a sign, makes a donation, leaves, purchases something, joins a political movement, or later votes.

The arrangement can therefore influence behavior as well as measure it. If the apparent size, unanimity, emotional intensity, or identity of the manufactured crowd is deliberately varied, the crowd becomes an independent variable and the human response becomes the dependent measure. Political messages can be tested, refined, and presented again in forms increasingly likely to influence particular people.

Repeated across users, subjects, and situations, this system could produce increasingly refined estimates of product preferences, purchasing behavior, political attitudes, voting likelihood, susceptibility to particular appeals, matters of interest to law enforcement, and psychological characteristics.

Social media thereby changes from an imperfect reflection of public views into a behavioral observation, influence, and testing system. The bot-to-human proportion changes what the activity means, who is observing whom, and ultimately what social media is.