Conspiracy Theories’ New Claim: The Internet Died in 2016!

There are many conspiracy theories on the internet. If you want to believe that the world is flat and that you’ll teleport like Pac-Man when walking along the edge of a cliff, there will surely be someone on the internet who will accept your strange approach. But what if the internet itself is part of the conspiracy? Let’s take a look together.

This is the basic premise of the conspiracy theory known as the “Dead Internet Theory,” which claims that around 2016 or 2017, the internet became much worse, and you’ve entered a graveyard where human activity is absent.

“It feels like the internet is empty and devoid of people. It’s also devoid of content. Today’s internet is completely sterile compared to the internet of 2007 (and beyond). There’s nowhere to go, and there’s nothing left to do, see, read, or experience,” says an influential piece on the subject. “Yes, the Internet may seem vast, but it’s like a hot air balloon with nothing inside.”

It’s quite a boring idea, but of course, the conspiracy theory gets weirder. It claims that the internet we know today consists largely of content generated by artificial intelligence (AI) and that it’s been placed there for nefarious purposes.

In the essay, it is said, ‘There is a large-scale, deliberate effort to manipulate online and, more continuous, culture and discourse using a system of bots and paid workers whose tasks are to produce content and respond to online content to advance the agenda of the people who employ them.

According to conspiracy theorists, these bots are constantly trying to influence public opinion on almost every political issue or distract you from questioning the elite and persuade you to buy products.

Karl Triebes, senior vice president at Imperva, who conducted the research, said in a statement at the time, “Bots have evolved rapidly since 2013, but with the emergence of productive artificial intelligence, technology will develop even faster and more worryingly over the next 10 years.”

The social media bots mentioned are familiar to all of us.

Content generated by bots is a problem for search engines and it will only get worse. People have been complaining about Google’s decline over the past few years, and research supports the idea that Google is directing people to less useful content than before.

Marissa Mayer, Google’s 20th employee who later served as CEO of Yahoo, believes the problem lies with the internet itself.

“It’s natural for people to blame Google when they don’t get quality search results like they used to, but Google sees its results more as a window into the web itself,” Mayer added.

The real question is: Why is the web deteriorating? Although it may feel like the internet is getting worse and bot activity is increasing due to the availability and ease of use of bots, it doesn’t mean the internet is dead.

Even though traffic is approaching an equal distribution between AI and humans, the majority of content is still produced by humans. Like all good conspiracy theories, the Dead Internet Theory takes a part of the truth or a consensus idea (that the internet is deteriorating and bot activity is increasing) and turns it into something it’s not.

Bot activity is increasing, and it’s far from being a good thing for the internet, but most of the content you see on the internet and most of the people on social media are not bots, and the internet hasn’t died yet.