What I’m about to write should worry you. It worries me.
News is now dominated by the Internet. But everything you read is being subtly manipulated by anonymous “bots” from unknown and mysterious sources.
These bots control what appears on your computer screen and smartphones. You are what you read. It’s controlling your mind. It’s controlling how you think. It’s controlling who you are.
The bots also manipulate reads and pageviews, rendering the trillion-dollar global digital ad industry something akin to a huge scam. Big Tech could perhaps do something about the bots, but these bots are immensely profitable to Big Tech, driving up ad impressions and creating billions in profits for Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and the entire online advertising industry.
How do I know? Because for the last three years my company has been developing its own digital platform. During this process, I have had a front-row seat to the dirty underbelly of digital platforms. It’s almost unbelievable what goes on.
A little background info: I watched for years as Google and Facebook grew to immense powerful monopolies, becoming the richest companies in history. There was nothing much my little newspaper company could do. Digital development costs were far beyond our reach.
But the same phenomenal technological progress that created the Internet also drove down costs in an equally phenomenal way. Think hard disk storage over the last 15 years.
Part of this technological progress was the rise of open-source content management systems (CMS) which were powerful and worldwide, utilizing millions of programmers that contributed advanced coding modules which they shared freely.
Imagine trying to build a 50-story high rise from scratch. But with our CMS, called Drupal, the high rise was already built for free. All we had to do was buy the office furniture. Little Emmerich Newspapers was off to the digital platform races, well behind but perhaps not too late.
Using a host of inexpensive off-shore Indian developers coordinated with daily 8 a.m. Zoom conferences, I realized they could do anything I asked. The only limitation was my imagination and creativity. It has been exhilarating.
I hired a young man who was Mississippi State’s online newspaper editor. He sat on the front row of a seminar I gave about the new age of media. He was the only one in the room with a coat and tie. Next thing you know, Brandon Grisham was the Emmerich Newspaper’s online development guru. He’s brilliant.
Realizing we had to accept the existing digital ecosystem, we first integrated our platform with Facebook, Twitter and Mailchimp. Everything we did was instantly plugged into these dominant platforms. Within a year, we had tens of thousands of Facebook and Twitter followers and 70,000 subscribers to our email newsletters. Our web stats were surging each month. Engagement was off the charts.
Realizing Google Ad Manager controlled the world, we found the perfect boutique digital ad management software founded by a super smart young entrepreneur. Broadstreet Ad Manager had just won the top award from the LION (Local Independent Online News) association.
Broadstreet, unlike Google, allowed us to have hundreds of state-of-the-art digital ad formats in high resolution. We were free from the tyranny of Google and its online ad auctions (99 for Google, one for us.)
While our weekly newspaper subscriptions were down or flat, our web stats were booming - doubling every year, bringing in millions of new readers. Emmerich News, with its 23 linked websites, quickly became the biggest news network in the state. Cross posting allowed us to share state news and hot local stories, vastly increasing the number of fresh articles each day.
Using APIs (Application Program Interfaces) we integrated Associated Press state, national and international news into our platform, on which we had control of the ad flow. We added dozens of cartoons and comics.
We then added social media: Friends, which works like Facebook. Neighbors, which works like Nextdoor. And Groups that allows anyone to create a private or public group to share posts.
We created Buy/Sell for a simple local online marketplace. We integrated micropayments so local posters can get paid for posting. We developed apps in Android.
We developed a flagging system so we could take down vicious and slanderous posts before they spread, using our existing staff, embedded in the actual community our websites are serving. Our website lag was a blazing fast one second.
Our goal is to bring the “local” back to online with community standards and accountability. Our local towns are no longer going to have their local advertisers sucked dry by Google and Facebook while any nut case can post fake news slandering innocent victims.
We are almost done and ready to really promote our micropayments with big local contests and promotions. We are waiting for the last piece of the puzzle: Getting in the Apple store. We just received our first Apple app approval last week. All our apps should be approved in the next few months. (Dealing with the walled garden of Apple is like dealing with the Kremlin!)
So just imagine my elation when our web stats tripled year over year in the last four or five months. I felt like it was a vindication of my Quixotic strategy.
But as my mentor Kelley Williams warned me, “When it seems too good to be true it usually is.”
Turns out our digital platform has now arrived. We are now botworthy. Every bot mucking up the Internet now has our digital platform on its radar. Hundreds of bots. Thousands of bots. A huge percentage of our growth was not people. It was bots.
This perplexed us. We use Google Analytics for our webstats, the gold standard. Google Analytics has a setting to filter out bots. Only problem, it doesn’t work.
We noticed certain articles would go viral, driven by the bots. Then we noticed a pattern. The bots were auto clicking on negative articles, such as the Jackson water crisis. These bots drive up the number of reads, causing the articles to “trend.” Once trending, these articles start appearing on “most read” and “trending” lists, driving even more traffic. The bots, probably Russian, were determining our headlines on websites throughout our country.
By making super negative articles trend, these anonymous bots are creating dissension and discord throughout our country. It’s why the Jackson water crisis so quickly went viral. That was a deliberate sabotage by bots to promote negative news. This goes on day in, day out.
Being what seems the only honest web platform out there, we decided to take action. We manually filtered out any web session that didn’t last at least two seconds. The bot sessions are a microsecond. That turned our 300 percent annual growth to 40 percent growth. Oh well.
The whole process gave me a front row seat into how bots are manipulating us. It’s scary. This is going to get much worse. Something must be done about it.
