There is a theory out there among not just sociologists and social pundits, but the average person who interacts with thousands of people a day on social media. It’s called “Dead Internet Theory,” and the basic premise is that most of the internet traffic we see, whether it’s accounts on social media, review sites, responses to emails, texts, et. al., are bots.
Bots, for those who might not know, are automated scripts that programmers create to emulate engagement as if a human being were behind the account. It’s like when you interact with a Chat bot. It’s designed to respond in certain ways based on key words and responses, and creates its own “personality” as a result.
Sometimes you get hilariously dangerous results like when a chat “AI,” as they like to call them now, says it’s perfectly safe to drink kerosene. A lot of the time though it’s far less hilariously awful and more just plain awful, as we see social media sites filled to the brim with these bots.
You may interact with 100 different accounts over the course of the day if you’re on Twitter, BlueSky, Facebook, Instagram, and other places, and of those 100 accounts, it is very likely that about half of them aren’t real people.
Now, you might have your curated list of friends, but even some of those may just be bots emulating the real account of someone else. It works much better if you’ve never met them before in every day life, because on the internet no one knows you’re a dog in a trench coat, you know what I mean?
It is getting more and more difficult to suss out what is and isn’t a bot these days, too, as these “AI” chat programs are fed more and more data from real people, and so what you end up getting are millions and millions of chat bots interacting with one another, and not a real human being among them.
Imagine that: a world where humanity dies, but there’s one corner of the internet still operating, and it’s chat bots pretending to be human and carrying on the inane shallowness of pop social media, like gushing over celebrities, and sharing the latest gossip about things that no longer exist.
It’s dystopian, and we are there now. We’re on the information super highway and most of the cars on the road are self-driving and have no passengers, and we interact with them every day, whether we realize it or not.
Doesn’t anyone else find that unnerving? That the very system created to connect human beings together is now used more for data scraping so that a silicon avatar of what once represented actual humanity takes over and floods that system with useless bullshit?
I find it unnerving. I find it awful. I find it darkly hilarious.
Of course, what isn’t funny is that a lot of these bots have also taken on our bigotries. Have you ever had a bot mock you for being trans? Make jokes about you for being gay? Being black? Well, they exist, and they’re out there carrying on hate’s work.
When you’re on Facebook, look at the public page of a trans person, note the laugh reacts under their posts when they’re talking about the trans experience. Follow some of those accounts down the rabbit hole, and you find out they’re not even real people.
Facebook alone has about 10 million bots at any given moment.
While Elon Musk denies this (as if he would tell the truth that fucking loser ass blood emerald apartheid fucker), many studies have estimated that 50% to 60% of Twitter/X’s user base are bots.
Imagine getting into an argument about trans rights with something that isn’t even a person, but is instead a piece of code created to get you to buy a product, service, or idea. It’s insidious.
Bots don’t have to reason, either, and so they can just spread hatred and bigotry around the internet, spread actual fake news, propaganda, under the guise of being a person, and while plenty of people can suss them out given enough time, there are whole age brackets that believe what they see on the internet.
Think about that next time you see a post on Facebook that says “why don’t pictures like this ever trend?” and it’s an obvious AI generated pic of Donald Trump carrying a baby in a life raft to safety, and underneath it you see hundreds of “PRAISE JESUS! AMEN” posts from people who may be grandparents, or they may just be more bots doing what they were designed to do: keeping the corpse of a dead internet on life support.
.Red
