Are You a Human?

I hate this.   It tells me to write what’s in the box to prove I’m a human but I have no idea what it says.  Is that an “a” or “ol”?  How the heck could a machine read this, a human can’t even decipher it.  And really, has the internet fallen in a digital sphere to the terminators already.  Since when did I have to start showing my beating heart to prove I’m human?  What will they think of next, clever riddles only a human could answer?  Blood samples?  Maybe.  Current research predicts that up to 30% of Twitter might be robots.  Robots going around and tweeting about products companies pay for.  Next time you  see a new product with 4 million tweets, it could be a third of those are nothing more than machines paid to boost a products popularity.

            So this all seems like conspiracy talk.  And maybe it is, but not like Bigfoot or Area 51.  One of my friends just got a job with a social marketing company.  Apparently a useful strategy is to pay money to companies in China that add millions of likes to whatever you want on Facebook in minutes.  We all learned from the 80’s that much of what is popular is based on what is being perceived as popular.

            Next time I see this stupid bar of letters I can barely understand, I’ll give it a warm greeting and thank it for keeping social networking human.