ZeroHedge | ~ "Everything Is Fake": Ex-Reddit CEO Confirms Internet Traffic Metrics Are Bull**** ~ | .. "It's all true: Everything is fake," tweeted Former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao regarding a Wednesday New York Magazine article which reveals that internet traffic metrics from some of the largest tech companies are overstated or fabricated. In other words; they're bull**** .. | Blogger: [Facial Recognition - The Economist’s “The World in 2019” Cover] ... In the meanwhile, Google wins lawsuit, can continue to use facial recognition tech on users without consent... Welcome to 2019 and The Economist newest special edition that predicts the trends and the events of the year to come.... |

It's all true: Everything is fake. Also mobile user counts are fake. No one has figured out how to count logged-out mobile users, as I learned at reddit. Every time someone switches cell towers, it looks like another user and inflates company user metrics https://t.co/tk1PKuvLL6

— Ellen K. Pao (@ekp) 27. december 2018

The metrics are fake.

Take something as seemingly simple as how we measure web traffic. Metrics should be the most real thing on the internet: They are countable, trackable, and verifiable, and their existence undergirds the advertising business that drives our biggest social and search platforms. Yet not even Facebook, the world’s greatest data–gathering organization, seems able to produce genuine figures. In October, small advertisers filed suit against the social-media giant, accusing it of covering up, for a year, its significant overstatements of the time users spent watching videos on the platform (by 60 to 80 percent, Facebook says; by 150 to 900 percent, the plaintiffs say). According to an exhaustive list at MarketingLand, over the past two years Facebook has admitted to misreporting the reach of posts on Facebook Pages (in two different ways), the rate at which viewers complete ad videos, the average time spent reading its “Instant Articles,” the amount of referral traffic from Facebook to external websites, the number of views that videos received via Facebook’s mobile site, and the number of video views in Instant Articles.

Can we still trust the metrics? After the Inversion, what’s the point? Even when we put our faith in their accuracy, there’s something not quite real about them: My favorite statistic this year was Facebook’s claim that 75 million people watched at least a minute of Facebook Watch videos every day — though, as Facebook admitted, the 60 seconds in that one minute didn’t need to be watched consecutively. Real videos, real people, fake minutes. -NYMag

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HIDDEN MESSAGES: The World in 2019 According to the Economist Magazine - The cover features an exact replica of da Vinci’s sketch analyzing the proportions of the human head. Above the image is written (in reverse) “Facial recognition”, which the next step in Big Brother surveillance technology. LINK