More than half of the traffic on the internet comes from bots, not humans, Axios reports.
According to the Imperva Incapsula Bot Traffic Report, which looked at visitors to the Incapsula network, over half of the network's visitors are bots, and half of those bots are "bad," meaning they are used to spread misinformation.
In 2016, just over 48 percent of visitors were human. Over 50 percent were bots, and the majority of those bots were "bad." Since 2011, bot visitors have outnumbered human ones every year except for 2015, when the majority of users were human.
Facebook, Google and Twitter are the most common platforms for fake accounts because they "want to make it easy for users all over the world to get on their platforms, because they believe in free speech and open access," according to Axios' Sara Fischer.
"But this level of openness means the barrier to entry on these platforms isn't just low for users, but for bots and bad actors as well."
Compare these services to Snapchat, which has far fewer fake users because of its focus on users having a network of friends rather than discovering them through the app, and because pictures and messages posted with Snapchat don't last more than 24 hours, making it harder for bots to spam the platform.
"Bad" bots are not only used to spread fake news, they're also used to manipulate online polls, according to cybersecurity firm Distil Networks.
"Online polls have almost no verification to an individual," Rami Essaid, the company's Chief Product and Strategy Officer, told Axios.
"If you go in an online survey, there's not an individualized SSN, or license. They look at people based on cookie's or IP addresses that can easily be mimicked through bots by bad actors."
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