• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Dead Internet Theory: According To Conspiracy Theorists, The Internet Died In 2016

February 2, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

There are plenty of conspiracy theories available on the internet. If you want to believe the world is flat and that if you walk off the edge you simply teleport your way to the other side like Pac-Man, you’d better believe that there’s someone on the internet who will support you in your weirdly specific ignorance. But what if [leans in close and checks for nearby CIA operatives] the internet is all part of the conspiracy too? 

That is the basic launching point of the “Dead Internet Theory”, the conspiracy theory that claims that in 2016 or 2017, the internet became much worse, and you are now logging on to a graveyard absent of human activity.

Advertisement

What is the dead internet theory?

“The Internet feels empty and devoid of people. It is also devoid of content. Compared to the internet of say 2007 (and beyond) the Internet of today is entirely sterile. There is nowhere to go and nothing to do, see, read or experience anymore,” one influential post on the topic reads. “Yes, the Internet may seem gigantic, but it’s like a hot air balloon with nothing inside.”

A pretty dull idea, but of course the conspiracy theory gets wacky. It claims that the internet as we know it today is largely just artificial intelligence (AI) generated content, put there for nefarious purposes.



“There is a large-scale, deliberate effort to manipulate culture and discourse online and in wider culture by utilising a system of bots and paid employees whose job it is to produce content and respond to content online in order to further the agenda of those they are employed by,” the aforementioned post claims.

Advertisement

According to conspiracy theorists, these bots attempt to influence public perception on just about any political topic, or else keep you constantly distracted and buying products, to keep you from questioning the elites.

Of course, there is a lot of bot activity on the internet. In fact, nearly half of all internet traffic (not internet content) came from bots in 2022. This includes activity like distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks, where websites are maliciously overloaded with a barrage of automated requests. 

“Bots have evolved rapidly since 2013, but with the advent of generative artificial intelligence, the technology will evolve at an even greater, more concerning pace over the next 10 years,” Karl Triebes, senior vice president at Imperva, the firm who carried out the research, said in a statement at the time.

“Cyber criminals will increase their focus on attacking API endpoints and application business logic with sophisticated automation. As a result, the business disruption and financial impact associated with bad bots will become even more significant in the coming years.”

Advertisement

These bots are probably already familiar to you from social media.

ⓘ IFLScience is not responsible for content shared from external sites.

Bot-generated content is a problem for search engines, which is also only going to get worse. People have complained about Google’s decline in the last few years, with studies backing up the idea that it is sending people to less useful content than before. Marissa Mayer, the 20th employee to join Google who went on to serve as CEO of Yahoo, believes that the problem is down to the internet itself becoming worse.

“I do think the quality of the Internet has taken a hit,” Mayer told Freakonomics. “When I started at Google, there were about 30 million web pages, so crawling them all and indexing them all was relatively straightforward. It sounds like a lot, but it’s small. Today, I think there was one point where Google had seen more than a trillion URLs.”

Advertisement

Mayer added that it was natural for people to blame Google when they aren’t getting the quality search results they used to, but she sees Google’s results as more of a window into the web itself.

“The real question is, why is the web getting worse?”

Though it can feel like the internet is getting worse, and that bot activity is on the increase due to their availability and ease of use, that doesn’t mean that the internet is dead. The majority of content is still produced by humans, even if traffic is edging closer to an even split between AI and humans.

Like all good conspiracy theories, the Dead Internet Theory takes a kernel of truth or agreed sentiment (that the internet is getting worse, and that bot activity is increasing) and twists it into something it isn’t. Bot activity is on the increase, and that’s far from a good thing for the internet, particularly as this is the content the next generation of AI chatbots will be trained on. But the majority of content you see online and people on social media are not bots, and the internet is far from dead. 

Advertisement

For now.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. UK firms need to take their post-Brexit trade opportunity -trade minister
  2. Evergrande set to miss second offshore bond coupon payment this month, sources say
  3. World-First Trial Could See Patients Grow Up To Five Mini Livers
  4. People Are Sharing Industry Secrets Which Would Cause Chaos If The Public Knew

Source Link: Dead Internet Theory: According To Conspiracy Theorists, The Internet Died In 2016

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • “The Body Is Slowly And Continuously Heated”: 14,000-Year-Old Smoked Mummies Are World’s Oldest
  • Pizza Slices, Polaroid Pictures, And Over 300 Hats: What’s Left Behind In Yellowstone’s Hydrothermal Areas?
  • The Mathematical Paradox That Lets You Create Something From Nothing
  • Ancient Asteroid Ripped Apart In Collision Had Flowing Water
  • Flying Foxes Include The World’s Biggest Bat And The Largest Mammal Capable Of True Flight
  • NASA Responds To Claims That Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS Is An Advanced Alien Spacecraft
  • Millions Of Tons Of Gold Are In Earth’s Oceans, Potentially Worth Over $2 Quadrillion
  • The Race Back To The Moon: US Vs China, Will What Happens Next Change The Future?
  • NOAA Issues G3 Geomagnetic Storm Warning As 500,000 Kilometer Hole Sends Solar Wind At Earth
  • Lasting 776 Days, This Is The Longest Case Of COVID-19 Ever Recorded
  • Living Cement: The Microbes In Your Walls Could Power The Future
  • What Can Your Earwax Reveal About Your Health?
  • Ever Seen A Giraffe Use An Inhaler? Now You Can, And It’s Incredibly Wholesome
  • Martian Mudstone Has Features That Might Be Biosignatures, New Brain Implant Can Decode Your Internal Monologue, And Much More This Week
  • Crocodiles Weren’t All Blood-Thirsty Killers, Some Evolved To Be Plant-Eating Vegetarians
  • Stratospheric Warming Event May Be Unfolding In The Southern Polar Vortex, Shaking Up Global Weather Systems
  • 15 Years Ago, Bees In Brooklyn Appeared Red After Snacking Where They Shouldn’t
  • Carnian Pluvial Event: It Rained For 2 Million Years — And It Changed Planet Earth Forever
  • There’s Volcanic Unrest At The Campi Flegrei Caldera – Here’s What We Know
  • The “Rumpelstiltskin Effect”: When Just Getting A Diagnosis Is Enough To Start The Healing
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version