Are bots taking over the internet?

Enrique Dans
Enrique Dans
Published in
3 min readMay 5, 2024

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IMAGE: An illustration visually representing the “Dead Internet Theory”. It features a desolate digital landscape resembling a cityscape made of circuit boards and data streams, devoid of human presence, and populated by AI elements. This captures the eerie and abandoned atmosphere suggested by the theory, emphasizing a world dominated by automation and minimal genuine human interaction

A report by cybersecurity specialists Imperva concludes that almost half of internet traffic already comes from non-human sources; that’s to say it’s initiated by the activity of bots.

Robots can now create content of all kinds, and consume it: from updates on social networks to news on media and music, fueling dumb schemes that move money flows based on even dumber metrics. I know that I am real, that…

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Enrique Dans
Enrique Dans

Professor of Innovation at IE Business School and blogger (in English here and in Spanish at enriquedans.com)