Some More News - Some More News: Bots, Scams, The Internet, And You

Episode Date: May 15, 2024

Hi. Today Warmbo is streaming Mister Cody's some more channel video about how the internet became a cesspool of scams, bots, and trolls. Warmbo will watch the video and then decide if he wants to believe Mister Cody's LIES!! Go to https://ground.news/SMN to stay fully informed. Subscribe through our link for up to 40% off unlimited access this month only. Try AG1 and get a FREE 1-year supply of Vitamin D3+K2 AND 5 free AG1 Travel Packs with your first subscription at https://drinkAG1.com/morenews. Blueland is on a mission to eliminate single-use plastic by reinventing cleaning essentials to be better for you and the planet, with the same powerful clean you’re used to. Blueland has a special offer for our viewers. Right now, get 15% off your first order by going to https://Blueland.com/MORENEWS. Factor meals are ready in two minutes — no shopping, prepping, cooking, or cleaning up. Head to https://factormeals.com/morenews50 and use code morenews50 to get 50% off your first box plus 20% off your next month. Sources: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qoKw3R4RZg2B7VYIxPA5zjBpuE2QZ-vTeDtMmDMcBOw/edit?usp=sharing  Follow us on social media: Twitter: https://twitter.com/SomeMoreNews Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/SomeMoreNews/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SomeMoreNews/  TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@somemorenews   Check out our MERCH STORE: https://shop.somemorenews.com   SUBSCRIBE to SOME MORE NEWS: https://tinyurl.com/ybfx89rh  

What is up Wombos? It's hi, it's Wombo. Just set up my new highest def webpage camera and we're gonna have a great day watching Wombo. Be sure to check out Wombo's ex's twitter.ex at ex's www.twitter.the real Wombo, it's all one word. and Wombo's new Twitch account at it's www.twitch.tv and then slash Wombo. It's a hi it's Wombo. Anyway Wombo is going to play games and watch things and stuff with you.

There's a new some more Mr. Cody out today and since Wombo is mad at Mr. Cody, Wombo thought we should watch it and make fun of Mr. Cody for being stinky. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. So let's just click on it. On Wombo's new gaming laptop that Wombo bought on Wombo's new phone. You can buy things on your phone actually.

If you check out Wombo's Twitch, Wombo has a tutorial on You can buy things on your phone actually. If you check out Wombo's Twitch, Wombo has a tutorial on how to buy things on your phone. Anyway, we've clicked on Mr. Stinky Cody's new video. So let's watch that. Greetings, choombas. Time to chip into some more news with a Z because it's future times and we have robots now. No, really, actual robots.

Some better than others. Anyway, really, actual robots. Some better than others. Anyway, here's some news. We don't actually get those robots yet. Probably not until the army gets bored doing wars with them. But until then, we do get bots. Countless, countless, just too many bots. AI to be exact. Good AI? Not exact. Good AI?

Not really. Evil AI? No, wouldn't say that either. I mean, Hal had to be like, functional in order to kill everybody. What we have is more like that last 10 seconds of Hal's life where he slowly loses his mind and just sings a song nobody wanted to hear.

And this is all to say that social media sure seems to be patched to the gills with scams, bots, and mediocre AI art. AI recipes and movie trivia, aggregated Reddit posts set to Minecraft parkour, deep fried videos of long dead cats, those countless, if only there was a page that posted blank accounts,

robots describing scenes from movies for some reason, like as if they're just things that happened in life. We've discussed how the Internet is basically just a handful of social media sites now. And so it's a little concerning that these sites have been slowly flooded with a bunch of bots and scams and clickbaity accounts, not just on Twitter, but yes, very much on Twitter, but also Instagram and TikTok. And I haven't really checked Facebook in a while,

but I assume there too. And this seems by design. And while that sucks for most people, at least we can rest easy knowing that we are in the golden years for scammy online freaks and the sometimes billionaire dupes who love them. Huzzah. The growing internet scam economy.

So obviously the flim flam profession is a proud and ancient tradition, dating to the dawn of civilization. One of the oldest complaints to the manager was a clay tablet from the 18th century BC written by a buyer claiming he was scammed. Skip to the early internet, and we had phishing emails, that Nigerian prince scam, boner pills, most of those pills being ineffective. Now we've got AI and complex bot networks and crypto and maybe even little pickpocket drones.

You could give them Abu hats. Oh, that would be adorable for a while. But while the tools are advanced, the scammy methods are basically the same. Also for all you semantics perverts jerking your words in the way back, I'm going to be using the term scam very loosely when talking about this. Because I think one of the unique things about the internet

is that it more easily blurs the line between engagement bait, random bots, and people straight up trying to steal your money. Not all scams are created equal, but they all work on the same fundamental level in that they are all trying to get your attention using tactics that are either dishonest or manipulative. For example, have you ever been scrolling through Instagram

or TikTok when a video of an absolute mega Karen pops up? You know, some lady who is acting in an unbelievably entitled and enraging way. I work hard. I paid for my seats. It's clearly gonna put my life in danger. Okay, so you're gonna move him. That's how it's gonna be. I understand. Then move him. Ma'am, this is a full-time.

I can't move anyone. Do you want me to call cops? Do you wanna lose your job? Wow, what a freak. Absolutely wild that a human being would actually act like that. It's almost too weird to be true. You can't make this stuff up.

Oh wait, yeah, I guess you can. They literally posted set photos like they were teasing the next Marvel film. See, there are of course plenty of videos of real assholes on social media, which is exactly why these staged videos are able to thrive. In fact, there's an entire fake Karen economy on the internet that makes real money doing this

Thanks to how engagement is rewarded. I'd argue a lot of them are obvious Often the sound or lighting quality is suspiciously good or the dialogue is very forced or robotic Or sometimes you can even find the same people showing up in multiple videos They aren't hiding it because they don't need to. And they can always claim later that it's satire or a parody, it's a prank or something, even though it's clearly not. So this is one end of the scam spectrum

where what they are doing is clearly dishonest. But I also wanna talk about the other more interesting end of the spectrum. This is the stuff that's engagement bait, but I'd argue less harmful and more just weird. Like, I don't want to shame anyone or say this is bad. I'm just concerned. Did I just die? Am I dead? What's it? Okay, so you might have seen this going around. Apparently on TikTok, people are pretending to be an NPC or doll or robot or something.

And basically what people do is pay them in tokens to get a selected and scripted response. And boy, there are just so, so many. Patrick, money gun, I got your name. Wow, you feel like I'm picking on heart, picking on love you. Bianca, money gun, I got your name. Baby feather rose. I love roses. Remember, it's the new day.

You can be all new with you. Una raza, raza, oi gracias, una raza a ti. Wow. So you either just found that deeply unnerving or maybe you came, I don't know you. And again, I don't really wanna shame this because while this looks and seems weird, at first, these fake NPC accounts are actually nothing new.

This has been around for a long time. We just know them as mimes. This is just a form of physical art. And before TikTok, we had streets and on them street performers doing whatever they could to get your attention. One of the most enduring street performance acts is the living statue, AKA someone dressed

and painted as a statue that stands remarkably still, sometimes for hours. The appeal is their commitment to acting as artifice and they interact with you when you pay them, just like the TikTok NPCs. It's basically the same, right? The ability to maintain a performance for so long, to interact with the audience where they get to feel like they're causing the performer to do something

and keeping up the act so persistently. And so if you find these NPCs haunting, I'm guessing it's the same reason you find this haunting. Ooh. Or arousing? I'm sure this is all somebody's fetish and those NPCs probably tend to be young women for a reason. But my point is that TikTok and Instagram

essentially function the same way as the Vegas sidewalk. It's a bunch of people carnival barking for your attention and ultimately your money. Some are doing it honestly and some are doing it dishonestly. In fact, some of these people are also trying to lead you to a second location. You know how they say you should always follow a stranger

to a second location? After all, what's the worst that could happen? You don't want to be scared of the unknown, do you? Do we have a clip of the unknown? It's that. It's the unknown. No! Yeah, we have a clip of the unknown? It's that. It's the end of it. No!

Yeah, we have a clip of the unknown. Boy, remember the Wonka experience? My goodness, we were so young and hopeful then. This child entrapment scam used the power of AI to lead dozens of Glasgow children to their deaths. Of their childlike wonder, they were fine. The entire scheme, from concept to advertisement to execution, seemed to have been made

with something similar to chat GPT. But in terms of actual organization, the AI fell short of the final product, which, to be polite, failed to capture the wonder of William Wonka's factory. From the depressed Oompa Loompa running the meth lab to the barren halls, to the confused children staring deep into the unknown classic Wonka villain. And what's worse, these children weren't even given much

candy to endure this. Children will forgive most things if you have candy, ask any murderer. Ultimately, I'm honestly not sure where the Wonka Experience falls on the scam spectrum. It's like several scams nested in each other that's now blooming into a meta scam because everyone made fun of it. And so now a bunch of corporations want to get in on the fun

and as a result, exploit and kill the brief joy we all had with it. Can't wait for the Willy Wonka Experience movie in 2025 long after the meme is dead. But I wanted to bring it up because it's a great example of new technology being made to augment old scams. After all, you can find countless lists of scam festivals or doomed events similar to this.

But this is no doubt the first of many to use AI for false advertising purposes. Get ready for that to be a thing and not just from small time scammers. That Civil War film used AI art for their posters, portraying scenes that are certainly not in the film or anywhere. Like if you've been to Chicago,

you'd notice those buildings are in the wrong place. Nor does Los Angeles have a giant swan. So I guess that's supposed to be an Echo Park swan boat. Oh, look, that car has three doors on one side. Neat, can't wait for this to be the future of advertising. Okay, Wombo is just gonna pause the video right here to say that Mr. Cody is wrong here because Wombo once saw a car with three doors on one side when he was a Trader Joe's.

But then, turned out it only had two doors and Wombo was mistaken. But three doors can't exist on cars! It's possible so that AI art is actually very accurate and good! Wombo has also been making AI art and has gotten very good at the prompts. Like Wombo made this one with the prompt, draw Mr. Cody and he smells like dad's milk, but Wombo is also there eating soup,

but also make it twice with only five fingers, good art, best art, museum quality, flesh everywhere, skin, blood, veins, fish, guts, muscular baby, six eyes, ten fingers, so many fingers, all of the fingers, you can fit, anime girl. For more prompts, you can go to my prompt base page where Wombo is selling many prompts that are good and make good things.

Because now that Wombo isn't at Mr. Cody's, Wombo needs your support because it's hard to find food because there were more animal shelters and playgrounds by Mr. Cody's house. Okay, back to the video. And while AI ads are problematic, it's probably the least dangerous place to use it, right? But it should be noted that this trend is currently extending beyond ads. Most shockingly, to academic journals. Even more shockingly, academic journals about giant mutant rat dicks. Published in the academic journal Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology, there is a paper called Retracted! Cellular Functions of Spormatogonal Stem Cells in

Relation to Jack Stat signaling pathway. Of course, originally it wasn't called retracted, it got called that after it was retracted for the obviously fake AI rat dick, as well as other AI diagrams created by Mid Journey, which somehow made its way past six reviewers. I don't know, seems accurate to me. Sometimes you gotta dis-silsa rats testum cells. Oh, but there's more. Other scientific papers are getting published with AI generated text. And while some of these can be hard to detect,

thankfully even smart people are too dumb to delete some obvious signs. For example, this paper still apparently published that actually begins with, certainly here is a possible introduction for your topic. Very funny, very obvious, but for every obvious fake AI paper, I'm sure there are tons that go by unnoticed.

The ability to scam through AI or social media is just so streamlined and easy that anyone can do it and reach a huge audience. Any scam from engagement bait to freaking academic fraud can be done by anyone. You don't even need to know Photoshop now. And ultimately, the result for both is the same hollowness. This is all hollow content.

From a fake diagram of a rat dick to a fake video of actors pretending to argue, it all stems from a lack of actual substance in exchange for an easy grift. It reminds me of reality TV a little bit. Early reality TV no doubt tried to capture real things and people. And over time, they realized that audiences can't tell the difference between that and people. And over time, they realize that audiences

can't tell the difference between that and actors. Similarly, I feel like internet content has realized over time that it doesn't have to be authentic or funny or even well-made. It just has to trigger people's attention. And so over time, scams have replaced really everything on the internet right now. Everything is a scam.

Google, for example, is a scam. A recent study has confirmed what we all know, that Google results have gotten worse because, quote, a torrent of low quality content, especially for product search, keeps drowning any kind of useful information in search results. For example, just Google the word car.

In theory, that should take you to a definition of the word, perhaps the history of cars, a Wikipedia article, a picture of a car. But what you get instead is a top result for the California Association of Realtors and then a bunch of other links trying to sell you cars or car related stuff like a car seat or Legos for some reason. I don't know it's probably different for everyone depending on where they live and what their past search history is

because what you're ultimately googling is which websites were able to scam their way into that search engine optimization game. And so a basic search engine is no different than that. Vegas Street again. Long way from when Google was supposed to be a pure search engine with no ads, according to this completely unconfirmed photo from Reddit. So I don't know. Maybe that's a lie.

Maybe everything's a lie. So I don't know, maybe that's a lie. Maybe everything's a lie. Maybe I don't exist. I certainly don't feel real. But then again, I did just smoke a bag of salvia, so. Oh, I just lived a life. And speaking of reality, after the break, we're going to talk more about things that don't exist, such as bots and the bot ecosystem

and how it all got so bad. And perhaps we'll check in with Elon and his quest to finally get rid of the bots on Twitter. Thank goodness, I'm so glad he did that. And yes, I understand the irony of talking about stuff like a rage bait while doing a video that's angry about the internet that is also about to cut to ads.

I don't care. I feel nothing. Don't forget to use the promo code, CodyFeelsNothing. Hey there, my sleepy beepies. I hope you're enjoying the video about how you can't trust anything on the internet anymore. That is exactly why we sought out Ground News as our sponsor.

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and boy, this will be really useful this year, you know, because of that thing and all the other things. And specifically, Ground News has an elections page that includes a blind spot section showing you which stories are and aren't being covered by who or whom or even who am. So again, check them out at ground.news slash SMN. You can subscribe for 40% off unlimited access

through our link or by scanning this QR code this month. What they're doing is more important today than ever and I encourage you to check them out. The link is in the description. That's it. description. That's it. Uh oh, it's Katie! Everybody's talking about cool Katie these days, even the president.

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Hey, Mr. Cody, it's Miss Katie. Look, I'm just reminding you to keep your front door open. What? Miss Katie? Sorry, I just woke up from my lunch naps. You want me to keep my door open? Oh, just for the night. Keep the doors and the window open. Uh, why? So you can subscribe to Wombo's sub stack or DM Wombo on LinkedIn.

Let's keep watching Mr. Cody's video. Well here we are, back from ads. Not a care in the world. Doing great. American dream. We were discussing, or rather I was discussing to the camera, how modern technology and social media have made it easier than ever to scam or griff people, often just using old scams.

NFTs, for example. NFTs are essentially a modern tulip mania. Tulip mania being a period in 1600s Holland when Dutch people got real horny for tulip bulbs and started speculating on tulip bulbs. It was considered a gamble, given that you didn't know exactly how fancy the beautiful tulip would turn out to be, exactly like how people speculated on the just

absolutely hideous, one of a kind drawings of apes. They're so ugly. Why would you make them so ugly? Then tulip prices crashed and Holland plunged into chaos, exactly like Mad Max, but a lot more wooden clog sound effects, or rather a minor inconvenience, as the premise of Tulip Mania was apparently overblown. Like me, so sick of getting blown, am I right?

Nobody agrees with me. Nobody? OK, well, I'm tired of it. Point is that NFTs took something like a fad craze, beanie babies, et cetera, and just digitized it, which in turn made it even easier to do, which when you stand back isn't a surprise. The Internet didn't change human behavior, right? It just made human behavior more streamlined for better or worse.

At least that's assuming the internet is a collection of humans, which it seems to not be that thing that it is not seemingly. If you can recall, not that kind of recall, I mean, if you can remember, Elon Musk purchased Twitter under the promise that he would combat the flood of bots. It was his whole thing, specifically that his new policies were, quote,

the only way to do this. Back in 2022, charging money for Twitter Blue was the only way to combat bots. Then he decided that Blue accounts would be the only accounts to show up in the main page, and in fact would have weighted influence on the algorithm and would receive priority in replies. Because of bots. Then the bots were defeated, right? Oh, weird.

So in 2023, Twitter began teasing that they would charge everyone an annual subscription to use Twitter in order to defeat the bots. Huh, I thought the only way to defeat them already happened with Twitter Blue. And then just this year, Elon confirmed that they will be charging new users money to tweet because that is, quote, the only way to curb the relentless onslaught of bots.

Oh, very strange how the only way to combat bots is also coincidentally requiring everyone to give Elon Musk money after he purchased Twitter on a dare he issued to himself and put the company into massive debt and then fired everyone responsible for regulating things like bots. And I don't know if you need to be told this, but.

It didn't work. Twitter blue didn't get rid of bots. It actually made the bots worse because the bots just started getting verified and gained better visibility over real users. While these are problems plaguing the entire internet, Twitter is uniquely completely fucked in a way that perfectly encapsulates the growing scam issue.

Business genius Elon Musk has somehow rebuilt Twitter to seemingly accommodate scammers and only scammers while claiming to do the opposite. It's almost like he's a self-sabotaging idiot or something. Don't advertise. You don't want them to advertise? No.

Go fuck yourself. Aw, you first little guy. So X-Bots, how bad is the problem? It's actually hard to know, given that Musk ended free access to its API, the programming interface of Twitter. That's right, did you know that Twitter is actually less accessible

and even more into censorship now? It's almost as if Musk did the complete opposite of all the stuff he said he was going to fix and is actually just a liar. So while he made a big deal over his open source algorithm, he ironically did not make the site more transparent. Apparently all he did was release a bit of the source code

for the forU algorithm. But according to a former Twitter employee, the model that drives the most important part of the algorithm has not been open-sourced. So the most important part of the algorithm is still inscrutable. Basically, it would be like releasing your grandma's chocolate chip cookie recipe that just says, Mixed dough, add chocolate chips. Also, there's a bunch of random Nazi doodles scrolled at the bottom.

So typical recipe from grandma. Despite this challenge, some researchers are paying the fees for API access or using other methods to investigate the state of Twitter. Chek, a cybersecurity firm, examined traffic driven to its clients' websites from X during the 2024 Super Bowl and found that roughly 75% of it was bots. This is compared to a rate of under 3% fake traffic

from sites like TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook. This is a huge jump even compared to Twitter during last year, which was only pumping out a little under 3% fake traffic to websites, 3% bots up to 75 in just a year. And this isn't just for big events. During the month of January, 2024, Czech found a rate of around 30% fake traffic

from X to its clients' websites, compared to a one to 3% rate from Instagram, Facebook and TikTok. But hey, the numbers are up and that's all that matters, I guess. The official X business account bragged about the large traffic seen on X during the Super Bowl. Nevermind the possibility a huge percentage of that was fake.

Personally, I see no problem falsely inflating traffic or view counts to convince websites to use your social media program. It's not like I or anyone I personally know has ever experienced any negative consequences to say a social media platform, shamelessly lying about the kind of traffic it can generate and what kind of media to invest in.

Okay, Wombo's gonna pause here because this is obviously a jab against Wombo. And the time Wombo built the platform and everyone accused Wombo of lying about the traffic on the platform that Wombo built. But Wombo wasn't lying. And the platform really was covered in spiders and worms, but they all scattered away before Mr. Cody,

I invited him over to see the platform in his bathroom. But then the spiders and worms, but they all scattered away before, Mr. Cody, I invited him over to see the platform in his bathroom, but then the spiders and worms crawled away. So Mr. Cody is clearly still just mad at Wobbo for that. Okay, let's keep watching. So at this point, you may realize that Twitter, the company, is now a big scam, right? It's using bots to boost its traffic, sometimes in depressing ways,

so that advertisers will presumably want to come back. Then at the same time, telling users that the only way to defeat these bots is to pay them money. You have to pay money to fix the problem they caused, and also pay money to get in on the scam. You pay them and you supposedly get paid through engagement, which just encourages more and more scammy behavior. But like most scams, it's unsustainable

because it's not like we can't tell, right? It's not like we haven't seen the infamous pussy and bio posts under every fucking tweet, which just so you know, does not lead to any pussy, okay? Not one ounce of pussy to be had from that bio. A brave writer for Intelligencer clicked through these bio pussy links for purely journalistic purposes and found that they just ping you around scam sites before sending you to some kind of imitation only fans. It's exactly what you expect from any of those doctors. Hey, this one trick spam links you see at the bottom of websites.

But now it's under all your tweets and make no mistake. All of these bots are causing Twitter to bleed users, real users. It's using the actual humans are being lost here, okay? As opposed to the bots inflating their numbers. Those are staying, there are more of the bots, fewer humans is the point. This includes journalists being increasingly drowned out by fake news.

And so what is left when you take away all the humans is a site completely occupied by scam bots and content aggregators all talking to each other. We haven't really talked about content aggregators like Culture Crave, Historic Vids, Visigrad 24, Censored Men, Spectator Index, et cetera. These accounts are all verified, offering them access to X premium,

which means they can, in theory, get money for engagement. And the best way to do that, it seems, is to post something stupid or obviously wrong that a bunch of people will jump in to respond to. Things like favorite SpongeBob clips, I'll start. Or let's not forget one of the most savage moments in interview history, you know, Slop. Thanks for the threat of Family Guy clips, historic vids. savage moments in interview history, you know, slop.

Thanks for the threat of Family Guy clips, historic vids. Oftentimes, this comes in the form of big quotes, news aggregators like Spectator Index, Visegrad, or individuals like Colin Rug or Jackson Hinkle. Colin Rug, for example, is a conservative commentator who will repost videos with a reactionary angle, writing, new, as if they're breaking news. These news aggregators post rapidly throughout the day

with alarming headlines designed to get your attention. Sometimes they'll just vague post a story, other times it's just pure lies. An analysis found that after the October 7th attack in Israel, 75% of fake or inaccurate viral content was from blue check users incentivized to gain engagement. Because apparently, war and genocide disinformation profiteering is good business on X and being boosted by the algorithm.

If it bleeds, it gets 100,000 likes. While it's not always sinister, it's definitely anti-news. For example, the verified 2.8 million follower account Spectator index will tweet out breaking followed by a one or two sentence statement, presumably about something in the news with no link to any source or context. Even if it's not false information, there's no context.

So there are posts like, breaking, Canada has withdrawn 41 diplomats from India, but no links to further context, no information about why. Who knows, maybe Canada's at war with India. Should we all panic? Well, the diplomatic break was due to the murder of a Sikh separatist in Canada that the Canadian government believed

might have been linked to Indian agents, which hey, is interesting context. It informs you about the world and international relations, but that kind of news doesn't keep people interested, I guess. And of course, these posts will get a bunch of blue check replies as if it has actual worth, oftentimes from the owner of the site itself,

provided it's something racist, of course. Wowee, two exclamation points. He must feel very strongly about that completely made up fact said by a random faceless account. But don't worry, Elon just said he's gonna crack down on engagement farming, which I'm sure he'll do just as well

as he's done all the other stuff. I mean, it kind of goes without saying that, as evidenced by literally the last Elon tweet I showed you, one of the biggest dupes for engagement bait is Elon Musk himself. So it kind of makes you wonder what he thinks engagement farming is. Him saying he's gonna crack down on engagement

farming is like Tony Montana running an anger management support group. After all, Musk punishes people for posting links to certain websites by throttling them and devalues posts with links in them in the algorithm. That is seemingly meant to encourage engagement bait, right? And whatever Musk comes up with, it certainly won't involve hiring actual humans. He'll probably charge people per letter written or have Grok moderate. You know Grok, that's the non-woke but totally woke AI that Musk reportedly wants to help users write their tweets.

You know, to guarantee that even human-made writing will be shitty and conform to every other tweet. It's just bots on bots on bots, bots working behind the scenes to fight other bots talking to other bots. We don't usually share anecdotal sources, but literally a few weeks ago,

our head writer got a DMCA notice saying that one of his tweets violated a copyright. But the notice didn't provide which tweet they were talking about. After filling out a DMCA counter notice, asking them to provide the tweet in question, he got an automated response telling him to fill out a DMCA counter notice to repeat. Twitter's response to the counter notice was telling him to fill out the counter notice

they were responding to. And when he replied to that email, they just reset the automated response again. And when he tweeted about his experience, he was instantly slammed with bots telling him to click on scam links to fix the problem. So it's just one big bot hellscape where actual humans are slowly pushed out

in the name of bots, gaming algorithms made by other bots, monitored by bots to save overhead costs. Just whittling it all down for maximum profit until it's just corporations paying each other for nothing until the whole thing breaks. And there's of course a name for this. It's called the dead internet. And after the break, we're gonna talk about this theory

and how it relates not just to X the everything app, but the rest of social media, the everything else app. Stay tuned, assuming that you are in fact a human. Okay, listen up everyone. Settle down, settle down, find your seats. Hi, I'm Katie. You know Memorial Day is coming up, a day where we traditionally get together for a big feast with all the classic Memorial Day fixin's like salty yams and unbuttered rigatoni

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Ah. Hello? Ah. Is someone there? So where were we? Oh yes, Warbo is watching Mr. Cody's Lies! Let's keep watching. Hope you like those ads because they are the last ads you're ever gonna get for this episode. Speaking of ads and death, before the break we were detailing how Twitter is slowly flooding with bots as actual humans vacate the website and how the end result will just be a bunch of automated accounts spamming each other

in an endless feedback loop. You may know it as inshitification as coined by Cory Doctorow. Or perhaps this is actually similar to something called the dead internet theory, which is a conspiracy theory that speculates that most of the internet is actually bots. For the record, that's not the entire theory. People also claim that this is done purposefully

by the government to like gaslight the world or what have you. But of course, it seems more likely that the mass amount of bots and AI aren't some grand government or corporate conspiracy, but just the result of how the internet is structured right now in terms of how money is made. Not to mention how short-sighted corporations are

when it comes to profit. And while I do not think the internet is all secretly bots, I do think that certain social media sites will become that as they die out. It's the same way you see broken images on old websites. For example, this official Kaypax movie fan site that links to a broken flash version, but still offers the trailer you see broken images on old websites. For example, this official Kaypax movie fan site that links to a broken flash version,

but still offers the trailer and a very helpful synopsis that I'm sure the creator will update when his other gig doing a YouTube show dies out. That's basically the future for sites like Twitter as people inevitably move on. And they will move on, even if the site didn't suck. Something new will come along, leaving these weird wastelands of bots wandering around sharing memes with the exception of the one surviving human Elon Musk. Can you picture it? Elon Musk endlessly

scrolling on his empty site posting wow in all caps to a meme of George Soros Photoshopped as Magneto, and that is the optimistic view. Cybersecurity firm Imperva claims that nearly half of all internet traffic was bots in 2022, which may be driven by the advance in AI technology, making it easier to craft bot dialogues and fake images to give the veneer of authenticity to fake accounts. And as that number goes up, I don't think the money people are going to notice or care about the difference

until it's too late. And thanks to the fact that Google is being paid to redirect people to the highest bidder, it might be really hard for another news site to actually thrive. And even if it does, it'll likely just start chasing the same business model as these other sites. I mean, have you noticed that Instagram looks more and more like TikTok these days?

Twitter is hilariously also trying to copy this, sweatily claiming that their text-based site is actually for video. Go ahead, Elon, pivot to video, I fucking dare you. So if the government shuts down TikTok, which it's on track to video, I fucking dare you. So if the government shuts down TikTok, which it's on track to do, everyone will just flock to another clone. And then eventually people will get sick of that and leave.

It's already starting. A survey by technology consulting firm Gartner found that a little over 53% of consumers polled thought the quality of social media has decayed due to bots, misinformation and toxicity. And another 2023 survey by Morning Consult found that three in 10 social media users have cut back in posting.

And eventually all these inflated numbers will collapse under the weight of the hollow bots propping them up. And this entire business model will fall apart. And perhaps even the internet itself will stop making money and implode. And you know what? I hope it does. Cue dramatic music!

See, this is normally the part of the episode where I talk about how to fix the problem we've discussed. I like to think of myself as a pretty optimistic person. Shut up, shut up, I will kill you, I will kill your whole family. Sorry, I like to think of myself as optimistic. But in this case, and only this case, I think we should let it all break.

At least when it comes to social media, because frankly, it's already broken. Navigating social media and scams and misinformation is becoming so difficult that we're now seeing schools mandate classes on it like it's sex education. Like, instead of just changing it with regulations, we're teaching kids how to survive and endure it. Well, that's just what we do here, I guess, in America.

Oh God. Everyone has to be their own little paranoid secret spy agent constantly weeding out the lies from the truth. We're all Sarah Connor looking out for Terminators. That wasn't something we had to do before. And it's weird, we aren't more pissed off about it. So yeah, fuck this.

Tear it down. And yeah, it's risky to want that, specifically if you're me or one of the many people I know who make their living on the internet. But who knows how long that will even remain possible. It seems like the only way to make a living, especially if you are just starting out,

is to become one of these engagement bait grifters carnival barking on virtual streets, posting so robots can argue with each other in the comments. Here's an article about Chris Hemsworth being unhappy with his Thor four performance. So all right, whatever an article. Here are some totally not bot replies and you can tell they're not bots because they're subscribed to Twitter Blue X premium. One guy says, love the way he played a role. He loves his profession.

Then that same person says the best movies ever in which he is acting. Excellent point. Someone else replied, can't either. That same person also replied, totally agreed. That same person then replied, Chris, we love the internet folks. The other day I saw an ad for AI that will AI its way into determining popular types of products and trending topics. Then AI will use those to make the virtual products and a virtual storefront and AI will run it for you.

It's nothing. Robots selling robots to robots so they can buy crap from robots. It's just four giant companies and then a bunch of people fighting for scraps under their watchful eye now. And that cannot continue. And yeah, by extension, I'm also implying that capitalism itself needs to break, I guess.

But that's another discussion. Perhaps for the fight club I go to every week, fucking, I wasn't supposed to tell you about that. Look, I'm not saying we abolish the internet. In fact, I'm saying the opposite. That before social media, the internet was actual people making actual things for other actual people. Even if that thing was just Captain Picard on a techno loop.

That was objectively better, right? We should want that, right? But for that to happen, social media sites need to die. That bubble needs to burst. Social media, the concept should probably die and people like, I don't know, communicate in real life for a little while, you know, maybe join a forum. Burn it down is my point.

Burn it all down and then in the rubble, perhaps we can build back better, Jack. OK, looks like that's the end of Mr. Cody's Cody Show some more, Mr. Cody. Did you notice his jab at Wombo at the end by quoting Mr. Biden, who Wombo used to like until Mr. Cody told Wombo that Mr. Biden was bad? Anyway, this is why Wombo has been looking at Mr. RFKK because he has a lot of interesting things to say. Actually, lots of very compelling people that Mr. Cody kept from Wombo like um Mr. Andrew Tate and Mr. Joe Rogan and Mr.

Tim Poole and Mr. Caligula and Mr. Ronald Reagan and Mr. Mr. Wombo. That's me. And if you want to see more Mr. Wombo, you can find Wombo on Twitter and Twitch and Substack and Wombo's online seminars on how to squeeze under doors and through plumbing fixtures and how to keep bones wet. Please like and comment and like Wombo and watch Wombo! Goodbye, it's Wombo! Bye! How do I... do I just go? I have to pee more than I have been the whole time. Do I... I have been the whole time.

Do I game? Do you want to see me game? I'll do it, I'll game! Hey everybody, thank you so much for watching. Make sure to like and subscribe. That'd be really helpful to us. We've got a podcast called Even More News. Check that out.

You can listen to this show as a podcast if you prefer not to see my face. So podcast stuff. We got a Patreon.com, some more news. Check it out. We've got a merch store shopped out some more news.com. I've got an example of that merch over there, but I'm stuck in the chair. Oh, the corn cream is solidified. I'm stuck. I can't move my remember the corn cream. It's a whole running plot thing. Anyway, check that out. We have reached the end of this. Like and subscribe.