Percy Bartelt, opinions editor

“Can I use your post to create a mural?”; “Can you give me your phone number so I can log back into my account?”; “Can I commission you to draw a picture of my dog? I’ll give you $100 right away!”; “Great post! Follow me and DM for collaboration!” Please, I beg of you, STOP. The amount of bots flooding ALL social media sites is exhausting, and I know for a fact that everyone has encountered multiple — probably even a few just today! Bots are killing social media sites, and the “dead internet theory” seems to be coming closer to reality every day. 

Bots are nearly impossible to avoid. The closest way to avoid them would be to private your account if the app of your choice has that ability, but even still, bots are requesting to follow left and right. While a lot of them on Instagram or Twitter are merely metrics bots — inflating numbers and statistics on an account — there are still full-on scams and phishing schemes right along with them. 

Don’t even get me started on the momentous amount of porn-related bots with a man’s name as the username and then a made-up woman’s name in the bio. I do admit those are really funny, but not when I’m blocking and reporting dozens every single DAY. I wish I was inflating that number. 

The more innocent bots, just used for metrics farming, are more common, but sometimes more difficult to differentiate compared to the others. Still, it’s easy to see when they have the most basic information in their bio, or have sentences that make no sense in their posts. Once again it’s amusing but highly annoying to encounter on a daily basis. 

And if they’re everywhere, constantly growing and multiplying, what does that mean for the future of social media sites? If they’re filled with nonsense, “nothing” accounts being controlled either by scammers or completely controlled by AI, even going as far as to speak nothingness to EACH OTHER, how are we as users supposed to use a site dedicated to sharing and socializing with real people?

Now, the “dead internet theory” is a wild conspiracy that introduces the idea that the internet we use is completely filled with AI-generated people. It’s a wild theory that has some holes or things that make no feasible sense in this reality. I mean, I know for a fact that my parents are actually using their Facebook pages, and I know my friends are really the ones I’m talking to on Instagram. 

One of the main features of this “dead internet theory” is that these bots are created “to help manipulate algorithms and boost search results in order to ultimately manipulate consumers,” stated by Wikipedia and The Atlantic. It is interesting to compare the way bots are very commonly used for number/metrics farming to appear to have better statistics and popularity online, to the way that these sources are describing. It’s feeling all too familiar. 

Again, this “dead internet theory” is outlandish, dystopian even, but I feel like we’re coming close to this being a reality. Our sites are filled with fake, nothing people that are even talking with each other and having generated conversations, flooding comments, DM’s, liking every post you’ve ever shared, following you — EVERYTHING in order to crawl its way into your account to use for only God knows what. I’m sick of it, especially when content creators of all size followings make a living off their social media.