The Bots Have Officially Taken Over: "Automated Bots Now Make Up More Than Half of Global Internet Traffic" (and 75% of Twitter)
Last week, Fortune published an article. They compared the 90's dotcom boom to what's happening today with AI. Specifically, they're calling it an AI bubble. More specifically, the AI bubble might have something to do with the fact that half of the entire internet is bots. The numbers thrown out are staggering. Well... they would have been staggering years ago. If you're like me and spend an embarrassing portion of your life scrolling Twitter, the numbers actually seem to make perfect sense.
Fortune – The catch is that the surge in bot activity is not just disrupting web traffic—it may also be inflating the internet economy by distorting the very metrics that drive tech company valuations. Automated bots now make up more than half of global internet traffic. Bots surpassed human-generated activity for the first time in 2024, according to Imperva, a subsidiary of cybersecurity giant Thales. Imperva, which issues a “Bad Bot report,” found that almost 50% of internet traffic comes from non-human sources, with 20% of that being so-called “bad bots,” prone to a host of malicious activities.
Hence, 10% of all users on the internet are literally malicious robots. If I had to guess, I bet they're not even counting the fake Indian guys, or any of the bots who reply incessantly with 2-3 word sentences to every post on the internet. Those bots are malicious as anyone if you ask me.
I will not give that bot the satisfaction of putting his username in my blog. I do not think it's going too far to say whoever is behind those types of bot accounts deserve a life sentence. They are horrible people who actively make the world a worse place. Them and Dov Kleiman. If Dov Kleiman ever tweets from the UK, I hope they utilize their infamous Online Safety Act to bust down his door and haul him off to the dingiest dungeon in their entire kingdom.
For whatever reason, that Fortune article lead people of Twitter to an old article published by Mashable (from two Super Bowls ago). The acticle included a statistic that many people (at least me, and a healthy portion of other people who missed it the first time around), are just now getting around to noticing. A company called CHEQ, who monitors bots and fake users on the internet, alleged that 75.85% of traffic during Super Bowl LVIII (Chiefs 25, 49ers 22) were fake users.
Now if you really want your mind blown, think of it this way.
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Thank you, 2mm. Thank you for putting that in terms I can understand.
On top of that, earlier this week, Twitch CEO Dan Clancy directly addressed their platform's issue with "viewbotting". Viewbotting is when streamers will pay for a service to send thousands of bots to their stream to boost their views. When you see streamer who has 10,000 people watching them play Mario Kart, and 4 total people in the chat, that's a streamer who is viewbotting.
Dexerto – When asked directly if a lot of streamers were viewbotting, Clancy confirmed that there are.
“Yes, they are constantly – it’s a constant battle,” he said. “There are third parties that do it, and especially when you get to ads, they try to viewbot for ads. They viewbot for all sorts of things, really.”
When pressed about specifics, Clancy claimed that streamers aren’t always complicit in the botting, adding that “most of the fraud is not on a big streamer” but rather, thousands of smaller ones.
“If they can create a thousand bogus accounts and then they create viewbots, then they can create bogus revenue,” the CEO explained.
The internet has a ridiculous bot problem. It's beyond frustrating. Especially if you spend time on Twitter. But clearly, there is a disgusting amount of money to be made in the bot game. And the problem obviously goes so far beyond making Twitter a terrible place to be. To the point that (according to Fortune) it's become a concern that the modern day AI boom is built on the backs of fake users and bots.
Fortune – Consider the investors that are pumping money into bot-boosted business models, and then consider the wisdom of Torsten Slok, the widely read chief economist for Apollo Global Management, who is known for shaking the financial community with his brief charticles in his “Daily Spark.” He recently posted an eye-popping chart, based off his calculations that “the difference between the IT bubble in the 1990s and the AI bubble today is that the top 10 companies in the S&P 500 today are more overvalued than they were in the 1990s.” In other words, if the AI trade is a bubble, it’s a bigger bubble than the one that popped in the days of the “dotcom crash,” leading to a nasty recession. Slok didn’t address the bot question, but it lends further seriousness to the debate: what if the current AI boom is built on the backs of bots?
In short, if the crazy rapid growth these AI companies are reporting is based on fake views and engagement… the type of growth that earns them massive investments from people looking to get in on the ground floor of the next big thing… whether they know their engagement is fraudulent or not, we're going to be fucked. When even the CEO of Twitch openly admits (or "claims") to have no idea how bad their bot problem actually is, that can't be a good sign. Last year, the co-founder of Twitch's main competitor Kick alleged that streamers are paying as much as $20,000 a week to boost their numbers. And they're making money from it.
Dexerto – Certain creators, such as Trainwreck, have claimed that some clout-chasing streamers are paying as much as $20,000 a week for advanced bots and that Twitch has the “number one” viewbotted streamer in the world.
Trainwreck is the co-founder of Kick. The main platform used by some of the biggest streamers in the world. I know we're in a whole new age of internet now where people can have stupid fucking names and be taken seriously. Mr. Beast is one of the richest men in the world. But that sentence alone, had you told me that 20 years, I'd have thought, "Oh shit, we're in trouble."
It's straight out of Idiocracy. A movie that's becoming more and more relevant by the day. The amount of money people make for views has never made sense to me. Mr. Beast can make a video where he gives a stranger 'x' amount of money, then make '3x' in profits off that same video. Not to accuse Mr. Beast of anything nefarious. He very much has a legitimate following. But things like that have just never added up right in my head. Every day I see a new name on Twitter that I've never heard before in my life. When I Google their name, I find that they have millions followers on a platform I didn't know existed and own half of the Philippines.
"FUCKING SERIOUSLY, you don't know CLIX?!?! Are you living under a rock?!?!" - Definitely somebody reading this
I swear if we got like, 10 Twitter accounts with large followings who tweet about online streamers, they could make up a completely fake person, and everybody would just roll with it like they've known them for years. They'd have a million followers within a week.
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The amount of money people make for views is crazy. I don't get it. I've always chalked it up to me not understanding how the internet works, and not understanding the true value of a click. Which I certainly don't. So maybe we are totally fine. Maybe this is just how the world works now, and were trending in the right direction. But gun to your head, if there was some sort of AI bubble crash that happened because we got WAY too carried away with bots and fake views… you can't tell me you'd be overly surprised.