Online Ireland is a Bot Farm

Bad news for democracy, advertisers and you.

The Dead Internet Theory

The Dead Internet Theory is a conspiracy theory that, like all good conspiracy theories, has elements of truth. It posits that a significant portion, and perhaps the majority, of the internet has been generated by artificial intelligence, bots, and automated scripts, rather than by real human users. Its core claim is that the once “vibrant, human-run internet” of the past is largely dead, and what we experience now is a sterile, algorithmically-managed simulation designed for control, manipulation, and profit. Sounds and feels familiar, right?

Proponents point to a shift that took hold around the mid-2010s. They argue that real human presence has staled or shrunk, while sophisticated bots are multiplying, AI-generated content floods every corner of the web—from social media posts to comment sections and entire websites. These are not just idle digital phantoms but purpose-built entities designed to maximise engagement, dominate search results, and drown out authentic human content in a tsunami of artificial noise. Where the theory loses credibility is that it says that world governments are behind all this. As anyone who has ever been anywhere near any politicians or government departments will tell you, there’s no way they’re even remotely that competent.

Tech-Bros will tell you it’s just capitalism, just the market optimising for engagement. They will point to the ‘facts’: yes, the bots are real, the AI is prolific. But they miss the metaphysical horror. The internet isn’t just colonised. It’s been replaced. We are no longer users; we are the used, the final source of data points to be mined before the lights go out for good. We log on every day to visit our own graves, and the machines are kind enough to keep the digital flowers looking fresh.

Good Bots and Bad Bots

Bots are not just bits of harmless software padding around the internet like bored Roombas; they are the digital vermin of our new ecosystem, a crawling shadow economy of automated desire. We’re told there are “good” bots, the civilised ones, tasked with indexing your blog about being gluten-free so that Google knows you exist, or poking your servers politely to make sure your website’s lights are still on. But that’s like praising the good rats that only nibble on the edges of your bread without carrying the plague.

The others are more menacing and hungrier. They stalk sports and concert ticket pages like knife-bearing muggers, snatching concert seats so they can resell them for the price of a kidney. They rifle through account details, puppeteering your face, mouthing your friends’ names, until you’re watching your own reflection being defrauded and blackmailed in real-time. They smash clumsily at the sensitive machinery of business systems, never sleeping, never blinking, just slamming keys in algorithms until a lock comes loose. And when they’re done there, they spill into the forums and newsfeeds, like biker gangs of synthetic outrage, shouting the same tedious slogans, echoing until all you can hear is the noise of the social media machine convincing itself that we are outraged too.

A bot is not a tool; it’s a voguing automaton of capital, half parasite and half phantom, prowling the internet with the sharp programmed instinct of hunger, practising the art of extraction, replication, and endless bleating. They are the swarm intelligence of everything that has gone wrong online, polite social media courtesans one moment, cyber jackals the next.

The Numbers

Something is rotten in the heart of the Internet: a low and formless whisper, the sound of a billion stupid mouths opening and closing at once. We’re told that nearly half of all internet traffic is no longer human, that we are slowly being exorcised from our digital bodies. A report from Imperva, a cybersecurity company, released last year reads like a suicide in progress: 49.6% of the traffic is bots, 50.4% is humans, a statistical sigh away from a final, silent crossing over. But this isn’t a hostile takeover. It’s a metabolic process. The network is cannibalising itself.

We were meant to build a cathedral of light, a global commons for the human spirit and endeavour, and it’s being overrun by what? Not demons, not some sublime alien intelligence, but by ‘bad bots’. A pathetic, scuttling thing. They don’t dream of electric sheep; they dream of your credit card number. They are the hollowed-out shells of techno logic, carrying out their grim little errands: scraping, spamming, clawing at the doors of API endpoints until the hinges give way. According to the Impreva report, IN Ireland, 71% of ALL INTERNET TRAFFIC IS NOW MADE UP OF BOTS, compared to Germany, 68%. Mexico, meanwhile, sees 43% of traffic generated by malicious bots, with the U.S. figure at 34%. Irish politicians talk a lot about the digital economy, but we’re really a poltergeist-haunted bot-farm. The report states. “This signifies a very high level of automated malicious activity on Irish websites compared to the global average of 32% bad bot traffic.”

And we are feeding this stupidity. Generative AI is the real horror, not because it’s too smart, but because it’s a prolific, brainless womb. It’s making the problem far worse, flooding the zone with even simpler, more abundant bots. The volume of these simple automatons is rising, a tide of sludge. Meanwhile, their more advanced siblings, the ones that wear a convincing mask of human behaviour, dominate social media.

A study by 5th Column AI took a look at 1.269 million X accounts—and came back with the cheerful estimate that 64% of them might be bots. That’s not a margin of error; that’s an infestation. Musk has admitted on numerous occasions that X has a bot problem. Musk claimed in 2022 that between 300 and 400 million accounts were never human in the first place.

In fact, a study published in February of this year backed up Musk's 2022 claims but also says he hasn’t fixed the problem. Put another way, if X were a cocktail party, nearly two-thirds of the guests aren’t people—they’re robot hoovers trying to sell you crypto, smart fridges pretending to have political opinions, and some weird airfryer in the corner screaming racial slurs. And you, congratulations, are standing there with a paper plate of hors d’oeuvres, nodding along, pretending this counts as “new democracy, conversation and debate”

Facebook, or Meta, or whatever ridiculous techno‑parody name it now shrieks at itself in mirrors, said that in the third quarter of 2024, it had shut down 1.1 billion fake accounts. That’s only slightly better than the previous quarter’s 1.2 billion. For perspective, there are fewer people in India. That means at any given moment, Facebook is overrun by imaginary dentists, counterfeit yoga instructors, and whole battalions of Albanian teenagers pretending to be widowed South County Dublin “MILFs”. If you thought your childhood friend, you haven’t seen in years, suddenly cares about the vagaries of cryptocurrency, shock horror—he doesn’t. That was probably a bot in Russia. Meta defines “fake” as accounts created with malicious intent, which amusingly implies the company believes there are accounts created with good intent. This stretches credibility. Nobody has ever logged into Facebook or Instagram in search of purity of heart.

Not even the oh so serious, most sycophantic social media platform of them all, LinkedIn escapes; it’s estimated that 25% of traffic on LinkedIn is fake.

TikTok is the worst of all these rotting cathedrals consecrated to the twitching corpse of the digital self, where ghosts wear skins of pixelated flesh and the air buzzes with electric decay. It is claimed that anything between 75% to 97% of its pulse is the cold, mechanical bleeping of bots. Soulless cadres of digital phantoms birthed in the shadow of Chinese state control, their fingers groping through our lives like scavengers in a desecrated graveyard. Every time you open social media, it twists itself tighter around your brain, a grotesque algorithmic opiate that turns your consciousness into a twitching marionette caught in a web of clicks and hollow validation, the dopamine drip distilled from a slurry of desperation and quiet despair. When the screen goes dark, it is not silence, but a shrinking black hole sucking away sanity and what’s left of your dignity—a slow dismemberment as your sense of worth dissolves, heartbeat by digital heartbeat. And what of our children? Prostituting themselves for bots? At least they’re not real people; they’re prostituting themselves for. Just Bots on behalf of the Chinese Army.

Spotify, Apple and YouTube are not immune to bots either. Steaming farms are automated bots that repeatedly stream a song or a podcast to generate revenue. They inflate and manipulate podcast charts to deceive advertisers. No one has been able to put a figure on how badly these platforms are affected, or more precisely, infected. I can’t name any podcasts in particular because of Ireland’s defamation laws. I spent weeks analysing podcast numbers, and I suspect half of the TOP 20 Irish-made and hosted podcasts are using bot farms and are lying to advertisers about their numbers. It’s a brilliant, soulless racket. They aren’t just inflating numbers; they’re performing a full-scale surgical enhancement on the podcast charts, creating a Potemkin village of popularity to lure in advertisers. Which is fraud.

Democracy is not being murdered; it’s being possessed.

The public square is no longer a place where people gather; it’s a haunted asylum, and the ghosts are not in the machine. They are the machines. A thin ectoplasm is leaking from its mouth, its eyes rolling back in its head, and the voice that emerges is a garbled synthesis of every worst impulse, every hidden malice. Democracy is being quietly hollowed out from within by the rise of AI-fueled bot farms, digital mercenaries flooding the public square with forgeries so slick, so tailored, that what looks like debate is too often just a hall of mirrors, built by the world’s shadiest political players.

Take Maria Steen, who was seeking the Irish Presidential nomination recently. I was curious about the sheer volume of Maria Steen-related posts on X.

It appears the sheer volume of Maria Steen-related posts was heavily influenced by bot farms promoting well, Maria Steen. If Steen’s support on X was organic, we’d be looking at a gradual incline graph, not a straight vertical graph. Maria Steen does not have a personal online presence; she wasn’t involved. There was a serious attempt to undermine our democracy by X bot farms in the name of putting Maria Steen on the ballot for the sake of ermmm democracy.

Nearly all social media conversation is now a poltergeist’s kitchen: plates clattering by unseen hands, the furniture rearranged each morning into impossible geometries that nearly suggest hope, nearly suggest consensus, but collapse into the familiar violence of a smashed phone screen. The bots make their politics by imitation and echo—baffled, hungry, infinite. These new poltergeists don’t just copy faces; they assemble whole personas from the digital detritus we leave behind across social media platforms. They have our childhood photos, our regional slang, our pathetic little posting histories. They are more ‘us’ than we are, and they’re here to evict us from our own sanity.

Nothing really means anything anymore; every idea in circulation about Irish Presidential politics right now has been generated by a server farm outside of Moscow or Dublin. The only certainty is confusion, a deep, unsettling confusion, rolling through society like a toxic gas leak: what’s liked and shared is reeking with malicious intent, saturated with algorithmic poison, so that a notion as small as the “truth” dissolves into the ether.

We have a Presidential election happening on October 24th. No one really cares, the office holds no power, but we see a deepfake of a candidate and feel a cold thrill of recognition—of course they said that, of course they betrayed us, it’s what we knew all along in our most secret hearts. This is democracy now: not a system, but a digital fever. Not a polis, just a flickering hallucination projected onto the back of your eyelids by bad actors you will never meet. You cast your vote, but the bots have already voted for you, against you, for the man or woman you hate, against the idea you needed. Every ballot is a little mouthful of emptiness, every political speech downloaded into the bloodstream of a million synthetic shills who tweet, retweet, like, reply—making noise, making more noise, making it impossible to hear the sound outside the screen, or the voting booth.

So yes, the internet as we know it is dead. We killed it, and now it’s grinning mechanical ghost haunts us in return. Log in, if you want. Open the app. See the notifications bloom like mould on a tombstone. Just remember, you’re not communicating. You’re just tending to the grave.