Marketing Scoops: What Is The Dead Internet Theory?

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Exactly three years ago today, Elon Musk tweeted that 90 percent of his tweet replies on what was then called Twitter were bot accounts. His insistence that Twitter was essentially one large bot farm was one of his main sticking points during his Twitter acquisition. Bots, particularly porn bots, have continued to be a problem on Musk’s X, so much so that even OpenAI head honcho Sam Altman took notice……..Continue reading……

By : Joe Hindy

Source: Mashable

Critics:

The dead Internet theory is a conspiracy theory which asserts that since around 2016 the Internet has consisted mainly of bot activity and automatically generated content manipulated by algorithmic curation, as part of a coordinated and intentional effort to control the population and minimize organic human activity. Proponents of the theory believe these social bots were created intentionally to help manipulate algorithms and boost search results in order to manipulate consumers.

Some proponents of the theory accuse government agencies of using bots to manipulate public perception. The dead Internet theory has gained traction because many of the observed phenomena are quantifiable, such as increased bot traffic, but the literature on the subject does not support the full theory. The dead Internet theory’s exact origin is difficult to pinpoint. In 2021, a post titled “Dead Internet Theory:

Most Of The Internet Is Fake” was published onto the forum Agora Road’s Macintosh Cafe esoteric board by a user named “IlluminatiPirate”, claiming to be building on previous posts from the same board and from Wizardchan, and marking the term’s spread beyond these initial imageboards. The conspiracy theory has entered public culture through widespread coverage and has been discussed on various high-profile YouTube channels.

It gained more mainstream attention with a September 2021 article in The Atlantic titled “Maybe You Missed It, but the Internet ‘Died’ Five Years Ago”. This article has been widely cited by other articles on the topic. ChatGPT is an AI chatbot whose late 2022 release to the general public led journalists to call the dead internet theory potentially more realistic than before. Before ChatGPT’s release, the dead internet theory mostly emphasized government organizations, corporations, and tech-literate individuals.

ChatGPT gives the average internet user access to large-language models. This technology caused concern that the Internet would become filled with content created through the use of AI that would drown out organic human content. In 2016, the security firm Imperva released a report on bot traffic after examining over 16.7 billion visits to 100,000 randomly-selected domains, and found that automated programs were responsible for 52% of web traffic.

This report has been used as evidence in reports on the dead Internet theory. Imperva’s report for 2023 found that 49.6% of internet traffic was automated, a 2% rise on 2022 which was partly attributed to artificial intelligence models scraping the web for training content. ChatGPT is an AI chatbot whose late 2022 release to the general public led journalists to call the dead internet theory potentially more realistic than before.

Before ChatGPT’s release, the dead internet theory mostly emphasized government organizations, corporations, and tech-literate individuals. ChatGPT gives the average internet user access to large-language models. This technology caused concern that the Internet would become filled with content created through the use of AI that would drown out organic human content. In 2016, the security firm Imperva released a report on bot traffic after examining over 16.7 billion visits to 100,000 randomly-selected domains, and found that automated programs were responsible for 52% of web traffic.

This report has been used as evidence in reports on the dead Internet theory.Imperva’s report for 2023 found that 49.6% of internet traffic was automated, a 2% rise on 2022 which was partly attributed to artificial intelligence models scraping the web for training content. The dead Internet theory has two main components: that organic human activity on the web has been displaced by bots and algorithmically curated search results, and that state actors are doing this in a coordinated effort to manipulate the human population.

The first part of this theory, that bots create much of the content on the internet and perhaps contribute more than organic human content, has been a concern for a while, with the original post by “IlluminatiPirate” citing the article “How Much of the Internet Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually” in New York magazine. The Dead Internet Theory goes on to include that Google, and other search engines, are censoring the Web by filtering content that is not desirable by limiting what is indexed and presented in search results.

While Google may suggest that there are millions of search results for a query, the results available to a user do not reflect that.^[3] This problem is exacerbated by the phenomenon known as link rot, which is caused when content at a website becomes unavailable, and all links to it on other sites break. This has led to the theory that Google is a Potemkin village, and the searchable Web is much smaller than we are led to believe.

The Dead Internet Theory suggests that this is part of the conspiracy to limit users to curated, and potentially artificial, content online. The second half of the dead Internet theory builds on this observable phenomenon by proposing that the U.S. government, corporations, or other actors are intentionally limiting users to curated, and potentially artificial AI-generated content, to manipulate the human population for a variety of reasons.

In the original post, the idea that bots have displaced human content is described as the “setup”, with the “thesis” of the theory itself focusing on the United States government being responsible for this, stating: “The U.S. government is engaging in an artificial intelligence-powered gaslighting of the entire world population.In the past, the Reddit website allowed free access to its API and data, which allowed users to employ third-party moderation apps and train AI in human interaction.

In 2023, the company moved to charge for access to its user dataset. Companies training AI are expected to continue to use this data for training future AI. As LLMs such as ChatGPT become available to the general public, they are increasingly being employed on Reddit by users and bot accounts. Professor Toby Walsh, a computer scientist at the University of New South Wales, said in an interview with Business Insider that training the next generation of AI on content created by previous generations could cause the content to suffer.

University of South Florida professor John Licato compared this situation of AI-generated web content flooding Reddit to the dead Internet theory.The dead internet theory has been discussed among users of the social media platform Twitter. Users have noted that bot activity has affected their experience.Numerous YouTube channels and online communities, including the Linus Tech Tips forums and the Joe Rogan subreddit, have covered the dead Internet theory, bringing the idea into mainstream discourse.

There has also been discussion and memes about this topic on the app TikTok, due to the fact that AI generated content has become more mainstream. On YouTube, there is a market online for fake views to boost a video’s credibility and reach broader audiences. At one point, fake views were so prevalent that some engineers were concerned YouTube’s algorithm for detecting them would begin to treat the fake views as default and start misclassifying real ones.

YouTube engineers coined the term “the Inversion” to describe this phenomenon. YouTube bots and the fear of “the Inversion” were cited as support for the dead Internet theory in a thread on the internet forum Melonland.

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Artificial influencers and the dead internet theory”. ridgit (2023).

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“Self-Replicating Prompts for Large Language Models: Towards Artificial Culture”.

“Une théorie du complot affirme qu’internet est « mort » depuis 2016”. Mariani, Robert (2023). “The Dead Internet to Come”.

The New Atlantis.

The Internet is Dead: The Truth Behind the Dead Internet Theory”.

Policy Paper Nr. 35/2023: Departe de utopii și distopii. Impactul AI asuprasecurității cibernetice

How dead is the internet?”. BBC Audio. BBC. Retrieved August 8, 2025.

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“Maybe Al Slop Is Killing the Internet, After All”.

“Conspiracy Theorists Says The Internet Has Been Dead Since 2016”.