Bob Dylan famously sang that “the times, they are a-changing” but he could not have anticipated some of the changes seen lately. One of the most fascinating aspects of running Commsrisk is the data gathered about the global distribution of its readership, the content they most engaged with, and the routes by which they found it. Earlier this week somebody commented to me about the popularity of Commsrisk articles on social media. I had to explain that social media tallies of comments, likes and reposts are poor predictors of how many people actually read an article. This observation is confirmed by the articles in the top two positions of this month’s popularity chart.
Anyone who follows me on LinkedIn can see the post that promoted the feel-good story in “Telia Makes Fraudsters Pay for Wangiri” received three times as many likes as anything else posted to my LinkedIn account during March. However, it was not the most-read Commsrisk article of the month. If you keep looking down the chart you will also notice “How Russia and Ukraine Tracks Mobile Phones on the Battlefield” keeps featuring in these charts, over a year after the article was published, and without any additional promotion on social media in the meantime.
Social media is a bubble where algorithms reinforce prejudices. Even well-informed users of social media may not appreciate the extent to which those algorithms skew their perception of the topics that other people care about. The increasing use of large language models (LLMs) and AI-enabled search is already having a noticeable impact on the traffic received by Commsrisk. For last month’s top ten rundown I observed that ChatGPT had surpassed Facebook as a source of referrals to Commsrisk. That seemed like an amusing and trivial milestone that said as much about the decline of Facebook as the rise of LLMs. Since then, the traffic from ChatGPT has more than doubled and is now comparable to that generated by X, formerly known as Twitter. If this rate of growth is sustained then it will not be long before AI chatbots generate more traffic for Commsrisk than all the social media platforms put together. The times, they really are a-changing.
The following rundown of Commsrisk’s most popular articles is ranked by the number of visitors that each page received during March.
- Legal Fight between Mobileum Investors Rumbles On
- Telia Makes Fraudsters Pay for Wangiri
- Five Charged with Espionage after Driving IMSI-Catchers around Manila
- Cheap New Open Source Tool Detects IMSI-Catchers
- Hero Who Hunted Down a Scam Boss Received No Reward or Damages
- 180 Arrested and SMS Blasters Seized as Philippines Cracks Down on Scam Hubs
- How Russia and Ukraine Tracks Mobile Phones on the Battlefield
- UK Plans Comprehensive Ban on Simboxes
- Malaysian Cyber Command Warns Against SMS for Multi-Factor Authentication
- GVG Loses Legal Fight over Unpaid $22mn Bill for Guinea’s National RA Audit
