Dead Internet Theory: Could conspiracy be becoming reality?

With the advancement of AI (artificial intelligence), many discussions about the future of technology have gained strength. Among them, there is a theory that suggests that the internet is no longer a space dominated by people and is now occupied by bots: the Dead Internet Theory.

According to this hypothesis, much of what we see daily on the internet would not be produced by people, but by artificial intelligence systems.

What is the Dead Internet Theory?
First of all, it is important to highlight that the Dead Internet Theory is not a study or a survey on the use of bots and artificial intelligence. In fact, it is a conspiracy theory that emerged on the internet itself, from discussions and messages published in online forums.

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It's not new that thousands of bots are circulating on social media. An example of this are profiles with little or no engagement that receive tens of thousands of likes from accounts that don't appear to belong to real people.

The Dead Internet Theory precisely argues that, today, the internet would occur mainly through the activities of bots and automatically generated content, manipulated by algorithms to control users.

This means that videos, images, publications and all other content that is currently available on the internet would be created by AI agents.

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According to theory, since 2016 or 2017, genuine interactions between people would have started to drastically reduce. Thus, fake profiles would have started to inflate engagement on social networks, while comments would be generated by algorithms.

It is also mentioned that search engines, such as Google, would filter out some of the content that is considered "authentic". For defenders of the theory, companies and even governments would maintain armies of bots to "shape" public opinion.

Where did the Dead Internet Theory originate?
The idea began appearing in online forums in the mid-2010s, but it began to gain more prominence only in 2021. An anonymous post on the Macintosh Cafe forum, attributed to the user "IlluminatiPirate", was one of the first to describe the theory in detail.

The name of the original publication is "Dead Internet Theory: Most of The Internet Is Fake", which means "Dead Internet Theory: Most of the Internet" is false in Portuguese.

In the publication, the author states that the internet would have "died" in 2016. In this view, much of the content we see today on social networks would be generated by artificial intelligence or reproduced by bots.

Are there many bots on the internet?
Bots are already present practically everywhere on the internet, but it is important to understand that there are different types of bots. According to the 2024 Imperva Bad Bot Report, almost half of global traffic originated from automated access and a relevant portion is made up of malicious bots.

Other estimates indicate that between 40% and 50% of traffic may have a "robotic" origin. This happens because, in addition to conversational AIs, there are many systems operating in the background on the network.

However, there are also legitimate bots. For example, the robots that do the work of indexing Google searches. On the other hand, malicious bots can spread spam, probe for vulnerabilities, distort metrics, or simulate fake engagement.

Another phenomenon is click farms; These operations combine human labor and automation to generate millions of fake likes, views, comments and followers.

Moltbook: the social network of bots
Moltbook was a recent case that seemed to turn the Dead Internet Theory into reality; but not yet this time.

The platform presented itself as "the first social network just for autonomous AIs" and promised to bring together intelligent agents capable of chatting freely with each other. Reports claimed Moltbook bots discussed religion, independence from their creators, and more.

But not everything was what it seemed.

Security experts showed that part of the publications were the result of a supposed "collective consciousness" of AIs. In fact, much of this content was influenced or even created by humans posing as bots within the platform.

There is already a lot of content generated by AI
A study by researchers at Stanford University, Imperial College London and the Internet Archive found that 35.3% of new websites launched in mid-2025 contained content produced with the help of artificial intelligence. Before 2022, this number was practically non-existent.

It is no surprise that this movement can be observed all over the internet. Bulk posts are written by chatbots, images are created by AI systems, and even podcasts and videos can be edited automatically.

Main types of AI-generated content today:

- Blogs, news and even textual memes produced by AI systems;
- Social media posts, captions, comments and marketing content created automatically;
- Images, illustrations, digital arts and graphics generated by AI;
- Videos, audios, voiceovers and even deepfakes produced by automated tools;
- Service chatbots, virtual assistants and code snippets generated by AI.

Can Dead Internet Theory Come True?
To date, there is no conclusive evidence that the internet has actually "died", as the theory suggests.

The most recent studies suggest that the network is undergoing a transformation, in which content and interactions produced by real people are increasingly mixed with automated systems and artificial intelligence tools.

Although bots and artificial intelligence systems are increasingly present on the internet, there is no evidence that there is centralized control capable of completely replacing human activity online.

For this reason, the Dead Internet Theory continues to be observed mainly as a conspiracy theory or even a metaphor to discuss the effects of automation.

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Source: CNN