Dead Internet Theory is True

Of the platforms where we know flesh and blood humans do spend enough time, 92% of all content is created by 10% of all users, and engagement with different posts can vary from 0.03% to 0.1% of all viewers. In other words, of the 52.6% of internet traffic which is human-driven, about 9 in 10 users stuck to messaging friends and family and just passively consume contents mostly meant to sell them stuff, or see if they would be interested in propaganda campaigns ran by governments, both theirs and foreign, often using bots and fake accounts to boost their messaging.

And now, AI is threatening to make things even worse. We’ve previously talked about the potential for chat bots to flood the web in nonsense that will immerse people in their chosen hyper-partisan reality from a rapid-fire spam-a-ganda cannon, or flood their screens and inboxes with ads. According to the latest estimates from Europol, every one of those concerns seems to be coming true and by the end of 2026, AI-generated content will account for 90% of everything we see online given its current trajectory. Meanwhile, bot traffic is growing by around 5% per year.

At this rate, not only will 9 in 10 pieces of content on the web be fake in two years, but 99.96% of all traffic to this content will come from bots and crawlers by 2037 if these bots aren’t forcefully reigned in. This doesn’t mean no one will use social media, read the news, or message their friends. It’s just that they will be overwhelmed by millions of bots, scrapers, fraudulent click scripts, and background services meant to handle and mitigate all that non-human traffic.