The Dead-Internet Theory Is Back

Five years ago, people who hang out in the stranger corners of the web started arguing that the internet was mostly fake . It had been this way since about 2016, they said, when Google introduced its artificial neural network for machine translation. Supposedly, from that point forward, online interactions began to be replaced, until nearly every message and picture had been posted by a bot. Everywhere you looked, websites were "empty and devoid of people," as one scholar of the theory put it. This wasn't true, but the core idea was tethered to a real phenomenon.