August 24, 2022
Dead Internet Theory Gets Another Data Point
The Dead Internet Theory posits that the internet is now mostly 'bots generating anodyne content and pretending to be human.
I'm skeptical because I'm human and as readers are aware I'm fully capable of producing anodyne content.
However, it now comes out that a Whistleblower at Twitter, one very high up in the companies hierarchy, is claiming that Twitter may be as much as 50% bots and ...
...that Twitter violated the terms of an 11-year-old settlement with the Federal Trade Commission by falsely claiming that it had a solid security plan. Zatko’s complaint alleges he had warned colleagues that half the company’s servers were running out-of-date and vulnerable software and that executives withheld dire facts about the number of breaches and lack of protection for user data, instead presenting directors with rosy charts measuring unimportant changes.
If true it means that Elon Musks complaints, based on his own analysis were valid.
It also means that at least in the case of Twitter, "Dead Internet Theory" has some merit.
I have an anecdote related to this. When I stream on Twitch I rarely get more than a few viewers in the course of even a long stream, yet when I look at chat at the very beginning of a stream, even when I'm doing an unscheduled stream, I can have as many as thirty "viewers" at least some of whom are known Twitchbots (like 'ComanderRoot'). This implies that Twitch is at least aware of the bots (as they don't count towards my stream viewership requirements for monetization). I'm one data point and my internet expertise can be summed up as "potato" but in light of these revelations about Twitter, it's food for thought.
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at
06:24 PM
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