Bots Broke the Internet and Gaming Might Be the One to Save It
The post Bots Broke the Internet and Gaming Might Be the One to Save It appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com. In 2025, much of what we see online may not be real. That includes followers, likes, comments, and views. According to Juniper Research, more than $114 billion in digital ad spend is expected to be lost this year to fake engagement. Bots and AI agents now drive over half of all web traffic, a growing share of which impersonates humans across platforms like TikTok, Reddit, YouTube, and X. Engagement, once the internet’s core currency, is collapsing under the weight of synthetic participation. A Crisis of Credibility In just one quarter, TikTok removed 185 million fake accounts. Facebook purged over a billion. Analysts estimate that more than 60 percent of X’s users could be bots, according to Internet 2.0’s 2024 study. And across social media, AI-generated comments, fake reviews, deepfakes, and synthetic influencers flood timelines and recommendation engines. Users are noticing. Surveys show growing “content fatigue” and erosion of trust. A 2025 report from CMSWire found that 81 percent of users no longer trust social media content, and over half skip past influencer posts, treating them as noise. Meanwhile, small businesses spend as much as 30 percent of their ad budgets on fake traffic (Tapper.ai). The implications are both financial and cultural. “It’s not just that ad dollars are being wasted,” says a digital marketing analyst who asked not to be named. “It’s that the entire system of online credibility is breaking down. The metrics we use to determine success are now suspect.” AI Has Accelerated the Problem The rise of large language models has dramatically scaled the problem. In 2025, Anthropic’s Claude was used to generate a coordinated network of fake personas on Facebook and X, engaging with tens of thousands of users in what researchers described as “influence-as-a-service.” Reddit recently banned university researchers who had deployed bots with distinct…
The post Bots Broke the Internet and Gaming Might Be the One to Save It appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.
In 2025, much of what we see online may not be real. That includes followers, likes, comments, and views. According to Juniper Research, more than $114 billion in digital ad spend is expected to be lost this year to fake engagement. Bots and AI agents now drive over half of all web traffic, a growing share of which impersonates humans across platforms like TikTok, Reddit, YouTube, and X. Engagement, once the internet’s core currency, is collapsing under the weight of synthetic participation. A Crisis of Credibility In just one quarter, TikTok removed 185 million fake accounts. Facebook purged over a billion. Analysts estimate that more than 60 percent of X’s users could be bots, according to Internet 2.0’s 2024 study. And across social media, AI-generated comments, fake reviews, deepfakes, and synthetic influencers flood timelines and recommendation engines. Users are noticing. Surveys show growing “content fatigue” and erosion of trust. A 2025 report from CMSWire found that 81 percent of users no longer trust social media content, and over half skip past influencer posts, treating them as noise. Meanwhile, small businesses spend as much as 30 percent of their ad budgets on fake traffic (Tapper.ai). The implications are both financial and cultural. “It’s not just that ad dollars are being wasted,” says a digital marketing analyst who asked not to be named. “It’s that the entire system of online credibility is breaking down. The metrics we use to determine success are now suspect.” AI Has Accelerated the Problem The rise of large language models has dramatically scaled the problem. In 2025, Anthropic’s Claude was used to generate a coordinated network of fake personas on Facebook and X, engaging with tens of thousands of users in what researchers described as “influence-as-a-service.” Reddit recently banned university researchers who had deployed bots with distinct…
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