You've been botted

摘要

IT WAS A spectacular bit of timing. On November 16th Baidu, a Chinese online-search giant, said it would buy yy Live, a China-focused video-streaming service with 40m monthly users, for $3.6bn. Two days later Muddy Waters, an American short-seller, published a report claiming YY Live was "an ecosystem of mirages" and "almost entirely fake". The share price of JOYY, YY Live's parent company, slid by 26%. Muddy Waters alleges that JOYY'S platforms, including YY Live, are infested with "bots"-computers that log on to "watch" streams, pretending to be human. Many, it says, appear to sit in JOYY'S internal networks. The upshot, it alleges, is that somewhere between 73% and 84% of JOYY'S revenue is suspect.