Last of two parts

BOTH the conspiracy theories and the evidence gathered by more sensible researchers trying to figure out what is really going on with the internet agree that the first signs of the 'dead internet' appeared in about 2016. In that year, the digital security firm Imperva released a report that found that 'bots' — autonomous programs that can interact with users and systems — were responsible for over half of all web traffic. The same report also found that every third visit to any website on the internet, social media or otherwise, is probably from a 'malicious' bot, with a purpose ranging from data-scraping to carrying out some kind of attack against the website.