THE LOUD EMPTY INTERNET – ARE ADS, BOTS AND BURNOUT TAKING OVER - NIRANJAN GIDWANI

 

Imagine opening one’s favorite app and realizing one does not recognize one’s own timeline anymore. The faces of friends have been pushed down, replaced by glossy product videos, AI-polished influencers, and viral “how to become a multi-millionaire before thirty” clips that all look the same. The strange thing is not that people are still online, but that they have stopped showing themselves there.

A large cross-country study of 250,000 people in 50 nations found that social media usage has fallen by about 10%, with the sharpest drop among the very youth who once made these platforms explode. They log in less, post even less, and often choose to simply scroll in silence, like visitors wandering through a mall that no longer sells anything they actually came for.

When friends became “inventory”

In the early years, social media was messy and charming. Blurry breakfast photos, bad selfies, and random life updates that nobody needed and everybody secretly loved. Over time, that chaos was cleaned up and “monetized” – the most happening buzzword. Algorithms discovered that ads, outrage, and hyper-produced content kept people scrolling longer than ordinary human moments. “Doom scrolling” as some call it. Never-ending scrolling. Slowly, the “social” part of social media was demoted. The “media” part, optimised for revenue, took over.

Today, many users describe their feeds as digital shopping malls, where every swipe sells a lifestyle, a product, an unbelievable service, or a carefully curated personal brand. Real posts from friends are buried and lost under layers of sponsored content, suggested creators, and viral clips. Have human relationships fallen into just another category of inventory fighting for attention?

Bots, fake engagement and the “dead internet”

While real people are posting less, non-human traffic is exploding. Recent cybersecurity reports indicate that more than half of global internet traffic now comes from bots, with a significant share from “bad bots” used for scraping, fraud, manipulation, or artificial engagement. These automated systems inflate views, likes, and comments, making it hard to know what is real and what is manufactured.

This fuels what many call the “dead internet” feeling: timelines filled with content that looks human but is often generated, optimised, or amplified by machines rather than people. For users, that means talking into a room where half the applause comes from invisible robots, turning authentic sharing into a strange, one-sided performance.