this post was submitted on 30 Mar 2026
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Social Media

Press Release.

Automated traffic—all non-human internet traffic—is growing eight times faster than human traffic, AI-driven traffic—traffic generated by or on behalf of AI systems—is the fastest-growing category of internet traffic, and for the first time, AI systems are not just reading the web but transacting on it.

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[–] Glytch@lemmy.world 3 points 10 hours ago

Advertising press release disguised as news.

[–] fmtx@lemmy.blahaj.zone 32 points 19 hours ago (2 children)

When I played Cyberpunk 2077, I thought the concept of the Blackwall was interesting, but a bit far fetched. A giant firewall to protect human networks from malicious AIs that got out of control on the internet? Nah.

Now I don't think so anymore.

[–] Kolanaki@pawb.social 9 points 19 hours ago (2 children)

The Great Firewall exists. Tho it's meant to control people, not AI.

[–] Specter@piefed.social 4 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

At this point The Great Firewall is looking more like it’s protecting people from this AI slop. I have no idea how websites are in China, but I think I would be okay with Europe raising a great firewall against US owned companies.

The damage US far-right influencers (along with Russian funding of local parties) is doing in Europe cannot be underestimated.

[–] reksas@sopuli.xyz 2 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)

except that blackwall was put there by corporations to protect their interests(malicious ai not messing everything up). Here we need that kind of blackwall to protect our interest against corporations which are essentially the malicious entities. But I wonder if non-corporate people/groups can even consider such projects anymore let alone maintain them so it would protect more than couple of people or small groups. It seems to me humanity in the west has lost the community spirit completely. Even fediverse feels more like fading embers that still warm you. Its just everyone for themselves and maybe their own little clique.

i would really love to be wrong.

[–] null@lemmy.org 17 points 17 hours ago

Social media always felt like shouting into the void, but these days it feels like the void shouts back with advertisements and proaganda.

[–] Supervisor194@lemmy.world 6 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)

And yet not a single word in that entire article about bots being used to post on Internet forums to engineer public opinion, which is certainly what came to my mind when I read the headline.

The closest it comes is the section where it admits that because they're all spoofing known Big Tech scrapers, they can't actually say how much of any particular activity is actually going on beyond some broad generalizations.

I can confirm though - my web server was positively getting hammered until I locked it down with fail2ban.

Dead Internet Theory is no longer really a theory, it's happening in real time.

[–] XLE@piefed.social 4 points 13 hours ago

Scary press release... But how convenient this company is warning about a threat that they promise to solve.

[–] Bazell@lemmy.zip 19 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (1 children)

No wonder why some sites started to lag so hard in recent months.

[–] JustEnoughDucks@slrpnk.net 5 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

Yeah my favorite electronics hobby supplies website has started to take 2-10 seconds to load. Still great service and the best selection of modules in my region though. They should really throw Anubis in front of it.

[–] melroy@kbin.melroy.org 3 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

Besides Anubis, is there any other tool that might work here?

I know about fail2ban and rate limiting configurations on Nginx level etc. But I mean, yes we have Anubis.. But aside of Anubis??

[–] JustEnoughDucks@slrpnk.net 1 points 11 hours ago

CrowdSec could probably catch a moderate amount of them, but that is really geared towards bad actors and malicious probing bots.

Fial2ban also wouldn't work at all here since they aren't trying brute force attacks, they are just using high bandwidth stealing as much public data from everything possible.

I think cloudflare is also making an alternative (or has already), but it is a tough problem.

[–] BillyClark@piefed.social 5 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago)

AI and bots have officially taken over the Internet

This title makes no logical sense. An official statement about a thing has to come from the entity that is in charge of that thing. So, if AI and bots have taken over the internet, any official announcement would logically have to come from the AI or bots.