Not a puzzle
Lately there's considerable discussion of the near-total fakery of web advertising and web "news". Bots talking to bots. The discussers claim this is a "problem" that needs to be "solved".

A couple of points are missing from the discussion.

First, these numbers are not surprising or shameful to the BIG players like Google and FB. They can tell who's bot and who's not, and they also generate a lot of bot traffic on their own.

Second, why would a big player WANT to have lots of fake eyeballs reading and watching its outputs? Fake eyeballs don't buy real products, so the fake watching doesn't lead to profit for advertisers.

Putting those two together, the answer emerges. It's plain old fraud. A small or midsized business using FB for advertising will pay FB the same rates whether the clicks are real or not. When most of the clicks are fake, the small business is NOT getting value for its payment. FB won't let the sucker know that the clicks are fake.

Small suckers need to understand that they're being defrauded... and in fact many of them have already understood and moved away from FB to more local or direct or old-fashioned forms of advertising.

Both FB and Google are clearly happy with this development. Both are working HARD to drive away large portions of REAL viewers and REAL advertisers. Demonetizing unfashionable channels, banning unfashionable speech. They WANT a system consisting solely of bots producing "content" watched by bots.

= = = = =

This is only a puzzle if you start with the old assumption that business seeks profit.

Small suckers do still operate on profit, but the big tech monsters operate SOLELY on share value. The stock racket has always preferred businesses without real customers and real employees. The preference has become an absolute rule since 1975. The stock racket is computers bouncing pure numbers back and forth.   ¶ 12:09 AM