Home » What if the Internet is just fiction? The latest online conspiracy theory

What if the Internet is just fiction? The latest online conspiracy theory

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For years, the Internet has been considered the main responsible for spreading conspiracy theories. Now, in a fascinating short circuit, the Net has become the protagonist of a new conspiracy thesis, according to which the Web is all fake.

According to this bizarre theory, it has started to spread in January 2021 on an obscure forum, where the post has now been read almost 100 thousand times, and then made its way on Reddit and finally also on YouTube, between the end of 2016 and the beginning of 2017 the original internet, populated by humans, would die.

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AIs take over the Net
It’s not that someone killed her all of a sudden, it’s that i content generated by real people they would have been ousted, submerged by an avalanche of fake content, created by artificial intelligences designed specifically for this purpose. What is the evidence of this conspiracy? Among others, supporters point out that large platforms are populating themselves with identical content. An example? As reported by The Atlantic, on Twitter, posts in English starting with “I hate texting” (ie “I hate texting”) have multiplied; countless accounts with teenage names and images suddenly started sending the same message, thousands and thousands of times, with minimal variations: from “I hate texting, I want to hug you” to “I hate texting, I wish I was with you”.

At first glance, nothing strange: it is teenagers in love tired of communicating via smartphone and eager to spend time together and for real. But how is it possible that these messages have begun to spread in such quantities? Will it be a very banal new online trend, perhaps resulting from the long lockdowns? Not for conspiracy theorists, who see one in this repetitive pattern demonstration of Twitter colonization and other social networks by bots, which (and this is true) tend to infinitely multiply the same types of content.

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Similar clues, if desired, we could also identify them in Italy: because suddenly everyone, on Facebook and elsewhere, seems post using the formula “Tell me who you are … without telling me who you are …”? Why does everyone seem to have to comment on the exact same events? Why do the politicians of some parties disseminate perfectly equal posts in unison, down to commas? The reason, conspiracy theorists suspect, would be only one: we are surrounded by bots, and the people we regularly interact with online may very well not be human.

Deepfake alarm, so artificial intelligence will help us (perhaps) to fight the fakes created by artificial intelligence

EMANUELE CAPONE

Blame? Always of the government
But what would be the goal of this conspiracy? According to his followers, all of it The internet would become a huge government propaganda tool, aimed at clouding the brains of populations and making them more controllable. A sequence of events (reported in the original post) would provide further evidence: in 2004, for example, the US defense agency for advanced research (Darpa, the same that created the first Internet prototypes) canceled his social networking project, LifeLog, a few months before Facebook was born, which would therefore be a disguised military project; then there is the diffusion of programs able to imitate the human language better and better and finally the advent, in 2017, of deepfakes.

And this is where things get interesting. Although this conspiracy theory is patently absurd (and if anything a demonstration that the Internet is still alive and able to surprise us with new bizarre), its followers seem to have intuited an interesting aspect: the Net is becoming more and more conformist, predictable and populated with repetitive, if not directly false, content.

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The reason why the same identical contents are repeated over and over on Twitter and Facebook is not that the social networks are populated (only) by bots, but that the big platforms actually encourage subscribers to have the same conversations over and over and to always give life to the same reactions, to replicate and maximize the topics of the moment capable of generating comments, likes and shares. We are not bots, but on Facebook and Instagram our behaviors still risk being heterodirected.

That’s not all: on the Internet, fake content is really multiplying. The aforementioned deepfake videos have now become indistinguishable from the real ones, making it more and more complex understand what is true and what is bogus. Political propaganda on social networks increasingly uses bots to spread election messages like wildfire. The aspiring influencers they actually buy fake followers and fake likes in the hope of attracting companies. And it is impossible not to notice how some of the most well-known influencers on a planetary scale are fake celebrities in computer graphics promoting big brands in fashion to millions of true followers.

It won’t be a government conspiracy against the population, but it is still disturbing the way it goes on the Net there is a shortage of original content and it is becoming more and more difficult to distinguish genuine from fake material. On the other hand, the Internet is that place where we are constantly being asked to click on a box to “prove you are not a robot”. Is it any wonder that someone seriously begins to doubt their surroundings?

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