Instagram has a billion users, but one in ten is not human

Instagram, the very popular Facebook social platform, has recently reached a billion users, but 95 million, nearly one in ten could be formed by robots, that is, accounts that appear as real accounts but do not actually represent human beings but who are programmed by sotftware to communicate and surf the net.

a new study, carried out for The Information by the research company Ghost Data. This result is somewhat superior to a similar study conducted in 2015. The increase in bots is particularly significant because, according to experts, these computer-controlled accounts instead of people are one of the key factors in the spreading false news, that is, those false news of political propaganda that invaded social networks in anticipation of the 2016 US presidential elections.

Instagram the next frontier of disinformation

These scandals have taken shape mainly on Facebook, WhatsApp and Twitter, but according to experts, Instagram may be the next frontier of the war against misinformation. We must also remember that Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram all belong to the same company, namely Facebook.

The phenomenon of ghost accounts on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter as well as on other platforms is not new. 2013 buy a pack of a thousand fake followers or "friends" cost less than 10 euros Just do some research on Google with requests such as "buy twitter followers" or "buy facebook friends" or "like" to realize that little has changed.

Social media marketing companies – real "bot farms" like the mysterious Rantic that produces up to 50,000 fake a day, even though most are based in India, Bangladesh and the Philippines – using many intermediaries for the rich business years, drink from a fund that only in 2014 moved to Facebook $ 200 million. The purposes for which these exterminated ghost users are changed are changed. manufactured

The army of bots (and the consequences for companies)

If previously we spoke of simple "social doping", that is to say an increase of followers in business or in popularity, perhaps climb the search engine rankings, it now covers several fronts: from dating, with the increase of fake female users, to the case of false criticism, from the internal propaganda to organized crime through political struggle.

The intoxication is strong also on the commercial level: it is enough to consider that, according to the Ponemon Institute figures, 10% of the databases of the companies questioned are false profiles potentially dangerous for the safety of the company. 39; information. A fake, fake user, mbad-produced by dedicated software or created by hand, can become an easy vehicle for spreading counterfeits.

If in the second case a user in real life can correspond to this user (and therefore implement specific actions often with clear objectives, ranging from defamation to insult, to generic disparagement, to "Trolling" policy or promotion of products), in the first case, it is essentially "bot", that is, automated profiles created for a certain purpose ( regenerate only certain types of content, as in the case of Isis, or attract reckless users to make them sing badually) who end up living their lives without intervention

More generally, it s'. is any account in which someone breaks for someone else – maybe stealing his or her identity – or something that produces online activities similar to those of a person human eras. More and more like those of a genuine user. The risk is that the phenomenon becomes creepy.

The main platforms are infested with viruses. Even though they try a periodic recovery. According to some sources on Facebook, the fake profiles would be about 81 million, for others over 130, but the most likely figure is 170 million. About 20 million would be on Twitter, even though the package includes so many silent users and in general the tools that allow these checks, like Twitter Audit, do not work very well. As well as internal estimates

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