Nothing is as it seems in today’s Internet of Things. In the last few years, we’ve seen a prevalence of fakeness across the internet. Fake news, fake people, fake websites… fake, fake, fake, and fake. Can anything be trusted online anymore? It seems as though anything online can be manipulated or exaggerated in order to fulfill a seemingly selfish and greedy need. An article was published late last year by New York Magazine that goes into detail about the many things that are fake on the internet. Their list is staggering.

First of all, people are fake. In today’s day and age of influencers and social media, everything can be bought. In fact, if you visit an influencers page on social media, you can often times see people soliciting likes and views. The Times found that you can buy 5,000 YouTube views, which is playing 30 seconds of a video, for as low as $15. Many content creators used to believe these views came from real people. But are now privy to the sly workings of a bot. To go beyond that, we as users are fake. Often, we are prompted to prove we’re not a bot by entering codes, clicking the photos with cars in it among a slew of other authentication measures. Is any of the information we put on the internet true or are be pushing our own agenda of manipulating our personas?

Most of the content is fake or bootlegged. From YouTube to the many social media platforms, to even news websites, a ton of the content that we receive daily is misinformation, to say the least. Content on the internet has become so muddy it is hard to differentiate real and fake or see through bias. This, in turn, flows into political fakeness. This is something we’ve all seen enough of, especially during the last Presidential election. Everywhere we turn are conspiracy theories and content promoting how fraudulent the government is. We are all familiar with the term fake news. It has caused many problems for people, no one knows what to believe anymore.

Often, businesses are fake. Many people use the internet to make a living, however, many also use the internet to scam and upsell people to turn a profit. One of the most recent examples is with Ticketmaster. People are buying concert tickets for a set price, then reselling them for triple the amount. Amazon has similar issues as well. Sellers will buy from Amazon, then turn around and resell on Amazon for twice as much money. These are both examples of surface level fakes, we all know the dark hole of the internet can get much deeper.

The take away here is that the internet is vastly fake and users need to be diligent as to not fall victim. Though it’s a bit disheartening, the internet is a facet of life that connects people (even if we’re all fake). Its necessity and function come before its integrity, which is apparent. The only way to change this fact is by changing ourselves. The internet is only a product of its creators, so we are reflected within that fakeness more so than we’d like to admit.