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by metalspot 847 days ago
> CHEQ also provided Mashable with fake traffic data from the entire month of January 2024. TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram all had very similar stats to each platform's respective Super Bowl weekend numbers. Slightly more than 2.8 percent of the 306 million visits sent from TikTok were determined to be fake. Out of the 90 million visits that came from Facebook, a bit more than 2 percent were fake. And Instagram's traffic was only 0.96 percent fake, based on 749,000 visits.

The relative scale on visits here doesn't make any sense: TikTok 306M, Facebook 90M, Twitter 759K, Instagram 749K.

This seems like marketing for a snake-oil bot detection product masquerading as a political hit piece to get attention.
3 comments
boomboomsubban 847 days ago
>The relative scale on visits here doesn't make any sense: TikTok 306M, Facebook 90M, Twitter 759K, Instagram 749K.

While I agree that this feels like an ad for CHEQ, their scale would presumably be based on how many ads their partners placed on various platforms. They could be buying far more ads on TikTok than on Instagram for some reason.

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crowcroft 846 days ago
'Ad fraud' and 'bot traffic' tools really don't have any true insight into these walled gardens.

None of them are running their own code on anyone's device to track anything, at best they're processing data given to them from a Meta/TikTok/X etc. API that might have a bit more data other people don't have access to.

Maybe that uncovers some new insight and some egregious cases of fraud occasionally, but ultimately the big platforms are basically just saying 'trust me bro' and getting rubber stamped by these vendors. I don't doubt X is full of bot traffic, but Meta might just be better at fudging their numbers to CHEQ for all we know.

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porphyra 847 days ago
Yeah the data seems sketchy but then Elon-haters anxious to see X fail will gobble it up as if it were gospel just to satiate their confirmation bias.

The truth is probably somewhere in between... there are probably actually a lot of bots on X but not nearly as bad as this report makes it seem.

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