Medium Faces The Same Fake Problem As Twitter

Did Elon Musk Predict The End Of Medium?

Have you seen this tweet?

The official account for Tesla made this tweet. We know it’s real (Snopes says it’s not real) because it has the Verified blue checkmark that means you can trust who you’re talking to isn’t fake.

If you’ve seen this tweet claiming a second Tesla has hit the World Trade Center, you know how bad the problem is getting for Elon Musk and Twitter.

But if you’re older than yesterday, you know how bad the problem of fakes and con artists has always been for every social media platform.

For the low price of $8, Elon Musk has just made it obvious.

Medium’s user demographics reveal the true victims of harmless fakes

Silicon Valley company Pied Piper was nearly legendary — until CEO Richard Hendricks discovered his company was about to collapse. Richard’s compression algorithm was the (only) reason the company existed, but once the company needed to make money, they needed to prove growth.

Except the company wasn’t growing at all.

Cracking down on spam accounts revealed it was actually much worse. The userbase was shrinking.

The algorithm giveth, the algorithm taketh

For a moment, the company’s leaders considered outsourcing to a Userbase Farm. At a generic UF, just like at a Click Farm (Business Insider), employees work day and night to coordinate inauthentic behavior across numerous accounts to give the appearance that each identity is unique and authentic.

None of the identities are unique. None of the identities are authentic. Many are all run by the same person, or at least the same group of people. Some work for companies. Others work for themselves. They run each identity like a job.

Art imitating life imitating art

In the HBO series Silicon Valley, the thrice-incubated nerds running Pied Piper faced an insurmountable challenge not even the algorithm could predict.

In the real world, media platforms like Medium, Twitter, and Facebook are threatened not just by the same algorithm-based challenges, but by the same deceptive solutions that led to the collapse of a fake company.

Medium is a real company that makes it easy — and profitable — to be a fake user. The trick to monetizing a fake account and escaping moderation is in having the resources to make each account appear to be authentic.

The people most likely to have those resources are the usual suspects.

| Twitter: $8 | Medium: $5 | Con Artists: Free |

According to a recent report from the Verge, most of Medium — assuming any of you out there are real — is White (71%), Male (55%), and earns $100k+ annual (53%).

If that’s you, then good news. Medium is probably looking out for you by default.

But if you’re in any way queer? You’re the most likely demographic to be the next victim of a con artist. So long as the con artist does not violate Medium’s Terms & Conditions, they are unlikely to be removed from the platform.

But even if they do violate the T&C…

Con artists contribute to Medium’s bottom line

At least in the short term, the more seemingly authentic users there are on a platform, the more valuable the platform. Even if Medium knows those users are all the same person.

No company wants to get caught hiring people to boost their metrics — see that time infamous cheating website Ashley Madison got caught cheating its mostly-male users — but if the majority of fake identities are run by the platform’s users, not the company’s employees, the company has no PR or metric-based incentive to intervene.

Say, for example, you’ve got a group of 1k users. Each account — whether run not by 1k people but by just one person — continues to engage with the platform, contributing clicks and reading time. All valuable metrics that the company can then quantify and monetize.

Will Duffield, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute, said, “Regardless of the name on the account, if they’re watching and being served relevant ads, then from a platform standpoint, it’s not really trouble.”

What’s so bad about being fake?

Then there is the question of whether the fake identities, beyond being fake, are doing anything the company would want to stop. Is a single user devoting their resources to maintaining multiple accounts worth chasing down? Is a commercial con artist allowed to make as many accounts as they want in order to boost their clicks, views, and paychecks?

In-depth reports by major social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter — as well as the US Senate’s own report — revealed that while stochastic operations may cultivate an ultimately political payoff, most fake accounts are engaged not in political but commercial behavior.

The con artist’s con now contributes to the platform’s bottom line, and that raises a question best answered by Tyler Durden.

What will cost the company more money?

It’s like that scene in Fight Club when Edward Norton, better half of Tyler Durden, explains why a company doesn’t always recall a product they know is dangerous. If the cost of a recall exceeds the projected cost of damages, the company does nothing.

In Medium’s case, the damages to their LGBTQ2S+ writers may not get their attention until the amount of fake users outnumber the real users to a point that no one on Medium could ignore if they tried.

Who wants to join a platform and meet great new friends, only to discover half a dozen of those people — all claiming to be different genders, different nationalities, sometimes different species — are different accounts run by the same person?

It makes for a great story, but as a trans woman who appreciates the power of platforms like Medium to help queer people like me present our most authentic selves, I feel creeped the **** out by people who abuse these platforms to gaslight authentic users.

People with trans experiences learn to laugh at the most absurd trans myths, but it’s not so funny when con artists are the people actually committing the evils trans people get blamed for. Whether those predators are also gender non-conforming is as much a coincidence as whether Dahmer was gay.

As noted by Kay Valley in an article with An Injustice, the point is that such an abuser’s actions contribute monstrous harm to our most vulnerable communities.

We all agreed to Medium’s Terms & Conditions

The numbers don’t lie. Most con artists are never reported. But what happens to the ones who are?

Take, for example, the problem Medium faces by not taking or communicating any observable action to protect the integrity of its userbase from abusive or violent con artists. Though the Terms & Conditions state that Medium allows pseudonyms, the T&C clarifies that not all pseudonyms are created equal.

Deceptive conduct We do not allow deceptive conduct on Medium. This includes creating an account, username, or publication that posts content or impersonates a person or organization in a way likely to deceive people. When we find instances of this, we reserve the right to suspend your account pending investigation and verification. (Medium T&C)

Medium reserves the right to suspend your account if you post content “in a way likely to deceive people.” But the key word is reserve. While Medium reserves the right to suspend a con artist engaged in deceptive behavior, Medium makes no guarantee their team will do anything.

Medium’s CEO insisted to me in a public comment thread (for an article by Jessica Wildfire) that he takes con artists seriously. But when asked what he would do about known con artists, he also stated that a large enough ratio of Medium’s userbase is authentic for him to consider the matter already handled well “on balance.”

It took a miracle to save Pied Piper

Pied Piper needed to project a certain metric of popularity and user growth or people would see the company wasn’t actually very popular. Almost no one was using it, and there was no growth at all.

According to reports (Blogging Guide), Medium’s demographics are mostly white, male, and earning well. But how can we trust even those numbers?

How can we trust that anyone on Medium outside of the circle we’ve personally verified is real? How can investors believe Medium’s claims about the platform’s monetary value when the company will not guarantee the integrity of its userbase?

What would it take to save Medium?

Harmless fakes ended up saving Pied Piper, but a thing is only harmless depending on who it hurts.

If the cost of the damages to educated white men who make over six figures never exceeds the ongoing cost of damage to the queer people hurt by con artists, companies like Medium, Twitter, and Facebook may find each con artist’s behavior too lucrative to justify intervention.

How to stay safe

Look out for each other. Remember who you’ve verified. And the next time you feel like you’re getting ganged up on in the comments section, laugh at how many of those bullies might be the same person using you for their next fix.

Additional reading

• Fake Trump, Bush, Tesla storm Twitter after verification dropped (Al Jazeera)
• Could Most Of Medium’s Userbase Really Be Fake Accounts Run By One Person? by Stephenie Magister ✨ (hey that’s me!)
• Medium Blog Statistics in 2022 (Blogging Guide)
• The mess at Medium (The Verge)
• Yes, the click farms on HBO’s ‘Silicon Valley’ are a real thing and they aren’t going away (Business Insider)
• Stochastic Terrorism and Right-Wing Cowardice Laura Halls
• Elon Musk’s $8 Per Month Problem is a Brilliant Case Study for 1-Man Consultants by Aldric Chen
• The Math Behind that Dick Joke in HBO’s “Silicon Valley” by Jørgen Veisdal
• Fakers are Gonna Fake…Even on Medium by Carmellita
• Medium is Swamped With Fake Accounts by Patrick Duane
• The Real Question Is: Why Did It Take Medium so Long to Purge Itself of Spam Accounts? by Jennifer Geer
• This is How You Find Out That a Medium Follower Is Fake by Casimiro Designer
• 19.42% of active Twitter accounts are fake or spam: Analysis (What’s New In Publishing)
• Social media platforms leave 95% of reported fake accounts up, study finds (Ars Technica)
• A Third of US Social Media Users Creating Fake Accounts (Good World News)