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Politics & conflicts

Bots, Cloudflare traffic and the dead-internet debate

Humans are down to 43%. Across all HTTP requests, humans are still ahead with 66%, but the direction is obvious.

The original publications are in English. Navigation is available in seven languages.

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Turns out the dead internet theory is starting to look less like a conspiracy...

According to Cloudflare, bots are now responsible for around 57% of HTML traffic on the web.

Humans are down to 43%. Across all HTTP requests, humans are still ahead with 66%, but the direction is obvious.

The web is no longer mainly a place where people visit websites. It is becoming a machine layer where crawlers, scrapers, scripts and AI agents collect, rank, rewrite and distribute information before most humans ever see it.

That should worry everyone, especially in Web3.

Once bots dominate the information layer, wealthy actors, exchanges, funds, corporations and political groups do not need to convince people directly anymore.

They only need to influence what the machines see, repeat, rank and amplify.

With enough money, accounts, APIs, fake engagement, paid narratives and automated distribution, truth becomes easier to bury and opinion becomes easier to manufacture.

And this space is already full of people who will sell a narrative for a bag.

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