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.”