Is the Internet already dead?

It's not the “human-like bots” that I'm worried about, it's the humans that are seemingly “bot-like” now that terrifies me. -Anonymous

This blog post is inspired by one of my favourite YouTubers “Chill Fuel” who often posts content about eerie and arcane incidents that happen on the internet. He posted a video on “Dead Internet Theory,” which piqued my interest enough to make me want to learn more about it and share it with the rest of the world.

In today’s world. The Internet is one of the most perplexing and anonymous places on the planet. The fact is that 90% of people who use the internet in their daily lives are just seeing the tip of the iceberg. The “Deep Web” refers to a vast amount of unknown information and material that is concealed from ordinary people. However, the deep web is a topic for another day; today, we’ll discuss a little piece of the deep web that isn’t transparent to the general public and that they are unaware of the fact that they are dealing with it daily.

“This website used to be fun”

“Argh! Instagram and Facebook are down again”

“She got so many followers, dude! are those real followers or just BOTS?”

Bots, everyone is familiar with the concept of bots, including why they exist and what they are used for. But are we fully aware of their online capabilities, or are we simply oblivious to a massive cyber menace that is heading our way?

Bots, often known as spiders, crawlers, and web bots, are Internet robots. While they can be used to execute repetitive tasks, such as indexing a search engine, they cannot be used to conduct complex tasks. Bots have come a long way in terms of invention and use, and as they are deployed all over the internet, they are becoming increasingly powerful, making it harder to tell if the person I am speaking with is actually a person. Despite the fact that the great majority of internet users are not bots. But then there’s the question, “What if?”

In this case, the ‘Dead Internet Theory’ comes in the frame. The theory states that the content which is generated on the internet is seemingly produced by AI Bots. This sounds insane, right?

Artificial Intelligence is becoming more advanced day by day. Deepfakes are becoming more realistic, chatbots are getting smarter and voice assistants are becoming more accurate. which makes it difficult to recognize a bot or human on the internet. The greatest example is Tesla’s auto-pilot feature which allows cars to drive without the help of physical human interaction on car systems. However, there is a theory that states that governments and businesses have successfully developed sophisticated technology capable of simulating a human presence on the internet, and that these technologies are used for two objectives.

Intelligent Online Marketing

Business organisations utilise strategies such as following a trend and making a meme or buzz out of it to boost their social media presence among genuine users. Allowing bots to create accounts on social media platforms, create content relevant to their company’s service and products, and generate likes and comments on a large scale that allows their posts to receive more engagement because it is suggested to real users, creating an indirect form of advertising for consumers.

Sway Public Opinion

The purpose of this one is the same as the previous one. Replace Companies with Governing Agencies. Whereas businesses use bots to increase profits, governments use bots to increase power. We’ve seen how easily a piece of false information propagated by a political party can be, so think how simple this work could be for an army of clever bots.

After all, the things I’ve made are all speculations, and there isn’t enough proof to show whether or not these conspiracy theories are true. However, just a few of the world’s greatest brains attempted to contribute their knowledge and research to this puzzle.

Ghost Data is a research group that covers crucial topics such as digital propaganda, online counterfeit and terrorism activities. To conduct research the company paid for 20,000 bots and analyzed their traits to help identify similar characteristics in about a million Instagram accounts, their study proved that Instagram, the Facebook-owned image-sharing app with 1 billion users worldwide, may have as many as 95 million bots posing as real accounts, making the platform the next frontier in the fight against misinformation, fake news and political propaganda, according to The Information. They estimated the percentage of Instagram users that are bot accounts had risen to 9.5% this year from 7.9% in 2015.

However, as previously said, with the growth of AI technology, bots may have overtaken humans on all social media platforms, posing a risk of altering public opinion simply due to the large number of bots dispersed across the internet. This notion is substantially supported by the Asch Conformity Experiment.

I’ll share the link which explains the experiment more in detail: Solomon Asch — Conformity Experiment

As of now, the Internet is still dependable for actual traders and people, but with the rapid advancement of technology, the future is uncertain. On every scale, we still find corporations and governments competing with one another, so there’s a chance that change will have an indirect impact on businesses and government organizations. Consider what might happen if Instagram began mass-producing web bots to promote their content online and for marketing goals. Similarly, Microsoft can develop a more powerful bot detection system that can be deployed on the internet.

Bots are used by the great majority of artists, content providers, and marketing firms just to promote their work on a broader scale. Twitter, for example, has announced the use of bots to push news and weather updates. What if there are tens of thousands of bot accounts on social media that are virtually indistinguishable from actual people? People are, however, utilising bots less maliciously, as demonstrated by the Twitter example above. However, utilising bots for product marketing and advertising is not far off, and who knows, it may already be in use behind our backs.

On this subject, there are a lot of big hypotheses and debates that could develop. It’s simply a personal opinion, but is “The Dead Internet Theory” anything to be concerned about, or may it pose a future threat to humanity?