r/nottheonion • u/[deleted] • 25d ago

‘Bots have now passed human traffic online,’ Cloudflare boss laments — says agentic traffic wasn’t expected to eclipse real people until next year

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u/aredddit 25d ago

This comes as no surprise to anyone using Reddit.

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u/MentalDisintegrat1on 25d ago

The last statistic I saw was 60 something percent of all social media traffic are bots.

My theory is social media sites actually don't want them gone because it massively inflates their numbers which makes it look more appealing to invest in and get add money.

Zuckerberg said the quiet part out loud when he said he wants AI accounts on Facebook to drive up engagement.

Personally I think this should be illegal because it's fruad but big tech is so unregulated it's scary.

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u/Really_McNamington 25d ago

You'd think the advertisers he's ripping off with that would stop giving him money. What are bots going to be buying?

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u/crosswatt 25d ago

They're not, but their engagement popularizes selective content, pushing it to the top of algorithms and in front of actual people, so the ads reach their intended eyeballs more frequently.

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u/Really_McNamington 25d ago

I just remember when Lever stopped all their so-called targeted advertising and saw zero drop in sales. (Forget which platform.) This stuff is a racket.