The Dead Internet Theory

[seri0us]

While browsing the Farms an interesting remark came to my attention, something about a 'Dead Internet' Theory. I went looking out for it and found the following /x/ thread (archive). TL;DR the theory consists of the assumption that bots are being utilized to derail discourse on 4chan and most likely other online communities. What's the goal of said machine? Who controls them?

 

[The Real SVP]

I wonder what became of Meximoot.

 

[Sperghetti]

Interesting, because the other day I ran across a blog post from a guy claiming that many of the sources journalists use are completely fake, though they might not know it. "Help a Reporter Out" requests get responded to by somebody pretending to be the demographics that the reporter requested, using a headshot generated through something like This Person Does Not Exist.

What's funny is that if you search for some of the names and job titles in that "Meet the Team" screenshot (it comes from here by the way), you can see them cited in articles from other publications.

They don't even need to be bots to be fake people.

 

[dumb idiot]

Cereal Experiment Lain

Spoiler: Tism

This says a lot about society

 

[Mr. Hedgehog]

There's definitely bots on Twitter and Reddit. There are novelty accounts that are openly bots that can respond to people. I have no doubt that bots that are supposedly real people exist. The problem is that the characteristics of bot posts - posts consisting of set phrases rearranged in various ways, only responding with set phrases instead of addressing the post, ungrammatical or incoherent posting - also apply to real people. It can be tough to tell real humans from bots. But on the other hand, it's also cheap to pay third worlders to spread your message.

Bots pretending to be real women are used on dating sites to get men to buy memberships. The Ashley Madison leaks showed that at least 70,000 accounts were fake. These accounts could respond to messages from male users, encouraging them to purchase services. Some analysis suggested that the majority of female accounts were fake.

There was a history of bots posting on Usenet going back to the early 80s. As garakfan69 mentioned, Mark V. Shaney was a Markov chain program based on posts on and posting to net.singles created by employees of Bell Labs. Many people thought that Mark was a real, if odd, person. A Markov chain, to simplify, analyzes a corpus of text and creates a statistical model weighing the likelihood of certain words or phrases following another. This model can be used to generate new texts which are largely grammatical, and can be seemly meaningful for short texts, but large texts are disjointed or incoherent. Markov chains are still used, notably for Twitter *ebooks accounts.

Another famous one was a spambot called Serdar Argic, the bot would scan all of Usenet for mentions of Turkey or Armenia and post messages arguing that the Armenian genocide never happened and that actually it was the Armenians that had committed genocide against Turkey. The bot famously would respond to posts about the animal or food turkey.

Several years ago I decided to check out Usenet. Outside of piracy groups and a handful of legit boomers still posting in certain nerd groups, it was like a ghost city. I saw dozens and dozens of discussion groups filled with nothing but spambots. Months and months of posts from multiple spambots posting every day. I found it strange. Spam killed Usenet, and long after any actual posters had left, these bots were still there, posting spam that almost no human would actually see.

you're saying that the singularity is under development in the bowels of Usenet? Imagine the horror: Bots talking to each other and developing into less and less retarded versions, until they're unleashed in forums and social media and they can pass Touring tests, if by Touring tests we mean being mistaken for humans by normies. Wait... I think we're already there.

 

[Mnutu]

you're saying that the singularity is under development in the bowels of Usenet? Imagine the horror: Bots talking to each other and developing into less and less retarded versions, until they're unleashed in forums and social media and they can pass Touring tests, if by Touring tests we mean being mistaken for humans by normies. Wait... I think we're already there.

It’d be an ominous proposition, but we’re talking about exams for roadies here, not Turing tests.

 

[9263900263]

Any one worth their salt would be using both bots and Indian/Chinese children surrounded by smart phones. If you want to derail a 4chan thread all you need to do is quote a post and type >shill. It will end up in a dumb flame war. There's been bots around too long and too effective at spam to ignore. Derailing threads you don't like with bots and using humans to manipulate the rest would be a much better tactic than either on it's own.

8ch taking away the interesting people from 4chan is an interesting idea too. The heads cut off the snake, leaving a nasty bite but no body to deliver that going forward. These days I would guess discord, telegram and fediverse have stolen most the good people away from the clearnet and they hide in their little bunkers. Only coming out to request piracy stuff and hunker down again.

4chans not a good way to judge bots being real or not because shitposters dominate it now. Autistic children spamming porn in every thread they can get away with make up the majority of content and they're going to look like bots even if they aren't. That's the end result of wojak and pepe culture. It's how /r9k/ got co opted.

 

[stares at error messages]

I changed my mind. Start listening after the 2 hour mark to the end.

https://www.bitchute.com/video/aJvwgClzxxUn/

You can probably quite early when Rekieta leaves.

 

[Punished “Venom” pH]

the botnets are only as powerful as your need to conform to what everyone else says.

 

[12FluidOunces]

Interesting, because the other day I ran across a blog post from a guy claiming that many of the sources journalists use are completely fake, though they might not know it. "Help a Reporter Out" requests get responded to by somebody pretending to be the demographics that the reporter requested, using a headshot generated through something like This Person Does Not Exist.

What's funny is that if you search for some of the names and job titles in that "Meet the Team" screenshot (it comes from here by the way), you can see them cited in articles from other publications.

They don't even need to be bots to be fake people.

https://www.johnwdefeo.com/articles/deepfakes-are-ruining-the-internet

These seem like real people at first glance, but they aren't. Someone who is familiar with generative adversarial networks can spot the “tells” that give the technology away. For example, look at the distorted backgrounds and mismatched earrings.

These so-called "experts" might not exist, but the spammers behind them were able to fool reporters at publications like New York Magazine, Woman's Day, Business.com, Inverse, Reader's Digest, Lifehacker, The Simple Dollar, Score, Fatherly, Legal Zoom, Business News Daily and Cheapism.

To make matters more concerning, these non-existent people were quoted in stories that discussed sensitive topics like parenting, mental health and COVID-19.

Archive link: https://archive.md/vwpyO

I think we're going to see more and more of these little dribbles as people discover that there are no reliable sources any longer...

 

[12FluidOunces]

https://public-assets.graphika.com/reports/graphika_report_fake_cluster_boosts_huawei.pdf

A cluster of inauthentic accounts on Twitter amplified, and sometimes created, articles that attacked the Belgian government’s recent plans to limit the access of “high-risk” suppliers to its 5G network. The plans are reportedly designed to limit the influence of Chinese firms, notably Huawei and ZTE

Someone manufactured a cluster of Twitter accounts (with fake faces of course) to sway the Belgian government.

Archive link: https://archive.md/VRUrp

Tip of the iceberg.

 

[12FluidOunces]

Archive link: https://archive.md/1XDeQ

https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.08436

Social Bots and Social Media Manipulation in 2020: The Year in Review​

Researchers from the Democracy Fund and Omidyar Network in their investigative report titled “Is Social Media a Threat to Democracy?”, [11] warn that the fundamental principles underlying democracy — trust, informed dialogue, a shared sense of reality, mutual consent, and participation— are being put to the ultimate litmus test by certain features and mechanisms of social media. They point out six main issues: 1) Echochambers, polarization, and hyper-partisanship; 2) Spread of false and/or misleadinginformation; 3) Conversion of popularity into legitimacy; 4) Manipulation by populist leaders, governments, and fringe actors; 5) Personal data capture and targeted messag-ing/advertising; and 6) Disruption of the public square

 

[Xarpho]

Bots are only possible in a cultural sense because so many of these sites (specifically Twitter and Facebook) are inundated by absolute retards. Even pre-Kiwi Farms and really getting hyper-aware of the state of the world/the Internet, I noticed how often there were comments on Facebook from people (who am I kidding, all women) who literally couldn't turn off their caps lock key when writing a thought.

 

[seri0us]

who literally couldn't turn off their caps lock key when writing a thought.

What if they were just leaning on the shift key the entire time? : )

 

[Jar-Jar Fanboy]

I suspect reddit is absolutely infested with bots, and it becomes noticeable in certain threads. For example, I've noticed it on r/pics, where the post will be either something completely mundane, or Boomer-on-Facebook-tier political posting, and it will get thousands upon thousands of upvotes, but a lot of the comments will be saying "what the fuck is this, and who's upvoting this?" The ones that aren't questioning it typically say generic things like, if it's a post about a wedding, there will be comments like, "wow, you guys look great!" or, "enjoy the honeymoon!" My suspicion is that there are a shitload of bots in the default subreddits, with the purpose of making reddit more "wholesome" and "advertiser-friendly," by upvoting that Facebook-tier bullshit. And in the major political subs, I think there are bots to upvote pro-leftwing/anti-rightwing articles, as well as people paid to go in and push a narrative in the comments, mixed in with generic bot comments. The major powermods are almost definitely in on it, considering that it's rumoured Ghislaine Maxwell was one of them. I think there are a lot of bots on the big sites, but for smaller forums like this, while I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility, this place definitely feels more "human," than the major social media sites

 

[seri0us]

considering that it's rumoured Ghislaine Maxwell was one of them

It's not a rumor it's a fact

 

[⠠⠠⠅⠑⠋⠋⠁⠇⠎ ⠠⠠⠊⠎ ⠠⠠⠁ ⠠⠠⠋⠁⠛]

Among them were things like saying he abandoned them, discrediting all his accomplishment and using all of his compromises as weaknesses

no that was just all true, with the exception of 'all of Trump's accomplishments'- none of which exist

https://public-assets.graphika.com/reports/graphika_report_fake_cluster_boosts_huawei.pdf

Someone manufactured a cluster of Twitter accounts (with fake faces of course) to sway the Belgian government.

Archive link: https://archive.md/VRUrp

Tip of the iceberg.

Try citing a source that isn't funded by the 'National Endowment for Democracy' (CIA) and NATO idjit.

 

[Demonslayer1776]

I suspect reddit is absolutely infested with bots, and it becomes noticeable in certain threads. For example, I've noticed it on r/pics, where the post will be either something completely mundane, or Boomer-on-Facebook-tier political posting, and it will get thousands upon thousands of upvotes, but a lot of the comments will be saying "what the fuck is this, and who's upvoting this?" The ones that aren't questioning it typically say generic things like, if it's a post about a wedding, there will be comments like, "wow, you guys look great!" or, "enjoy the honeymoon!" My suspicion is that there are a shitload of bots in the default subreddits, with the purpose of making reddit more "wholesome" and "advertiser-friendly," by upvoting that Facebook-tier bullshit. And in the major political subs, I think there are bots to upvote pro-leftwing/anti-rightwing articles, as well as people paid to go in and push a narrative in the comments, mixed in with generic bot comments. The major powermods are almost definitely in on it, considering that it's rumoured Ghislaine Maxwell was one of them. I think there are a lot of bots on the big sites, but for smaller forums like this, while I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility, this place definitely feels more "human," than the major social media sites

I agree, the amount of users on these sites just doesn't line up to me. Like, I can find many people in the wild who use these sites, but if you talk to the vast majority of them they rarely ever actually post. I wouldn't be surprised at all if alot of the active users on large social media sites like reddit and twitter and bots and Indians being used to intentionally manipulate public perception. The views prominent on these sites never line up with any demographic I see in real life, including in people who use them. We've seen enough tactics used to manipulate the public through information control that fake posts are an entirely realistic possibility.

 

[jje100010001]

In 2016, a political forum I am a member of saw a huge influx of political campaign bots from both sides. They were easier to spot then, since what typically gave them away was the same exact talking points being repeated almost word for word. New accounts and posting at the same times was also another thing that gave them away. However, over the years it's gotten harder to spot; the talking points are more varied, people can buy old accounts now, and now bots don't post at the same time anymore.

These days the bots seem to be less about trying to change your mind and more of trying to waste your time by "debating" you in circles so important information gets buried.

Wasn't that literally the case with Reddit's political forum when it instantly switched from a Bernie space into something that endlessly parroted Hillary puff pieces?

But yeah, I agree, the outlook is pessimistic and depressing, and yet to detach yourself from that (the only way to get a semblance of the old web back) means that they win.

The future is a smoothed and featureless, auto-curated-auto-moderated AI-generated public realm, while the real internet will lie in obscure hermetically sealed forums and private usergroups in the far corners of the web.

 

[whathefuckman]

Dead Internet is a direct result of the shadowbanning initiative. The internet is like a pseudo Truman Show now.