Jayce Rodrigues

Is the internet broken? This question comes to my mind while scrolling through my phone. More and more bots start to flood popular social media sites such as X (Twitter), Instagram, and Facebook.

Although the question isn’t new, due to the increased interest in AI technology it has made a resurgence. People who do believe that the internet is broken have dubbed this the “dead internet theory.” 

The theory states that the internet is slowly driving out real people who are being replaced by bots talking to each other. More specifically, the theory also states that increased bot activity is to control the algorithms and manipulate consumer interest, controlling what people consume and what does and doesn’t get popular.

A strong demonstration of this theory comes from X (Twitter), where a post compared the sound of a Kazakh engine to a diesel engine starting up in the winter. However, although the video was mistakenly posted without audio, the tweet received over 2000 likes, retweets, and comments. This implies that bots were liking and retweeting it without actually viewing the contents, artificially inflating the post’s popularity. 

Bots don’t just interact with commercial or public accounts, this has impacted me personally as every other day I log onto my personal private account and I see another follow request from a random bot account with a randomized first and last name. 

I don’t believe all follow requests are a bot. However, they get easier and easier to detect, especially when the only people you allow on your private account are people you know. It’s common when seeing a post blow up, scrolling down to the comments it will give you a plethora of verified bot accounts sharing contents barely relevant to the original post.