You're Probably Arguing With a Robot

That person calling you an idiot in the comments section might not even be a person. Cybersecurity firm Imperva dropped a bombshell in its 2025 report: for the first time in a decade, automated bots surpassed human activity, accounting for fifty-one percent of all web traffic in 2024.

Machines now outnumber humans online. Bad bots alone comprise thirty-seven percent of all internet traffic, reaching their highest level since tracking began in 2013.

These aren't just spam accounts flooding your favorite subreddit or posting nonsense under news articles. They're systematically warping the metrics that keep the entire digital economy spinning. Fake page views. Fake clicks. Fake user sessions. Fake ad interactions. The whole circus.

This artificial inflation distorts conversion rates and engagement times across platforms. The numbers that executives use to make billion-dollar decisions are increasingly fictional. Nobody wants to admit how much of their success depends on digital phantoms.

Bot traffic varies wildly between platforms. Cybersecurity firm CHEQ analyzed major social networks and found striking differences. TikTok had the lowest percentage of automated traffic at around three percent. Twitter topped the list with the worst bot problem by far.

During Super Bowl weekend in 2024, nearly seventy-six percent of traffic from Twitter to advertiser websites was fake, according to CHEQ data shared with Mashable. Three-quarters of everything clicking through to buy products or view ads came from bots. The platform's regular bot traffic runs lower but still dwarfs other networks at thirty-two percent.

CHEQ founder Guy Tytunovich told Mashable he'd never seen anything remotely close to those numbers. Facebook registered around two percent fake traffic during the same period. Instagram clocked in below one percent. Twitter's bot problem stands in a category by itself.

Companies love bragging about explosive user growth. They publish quarterly reports celebrating millions of new accounts and skyrocketing engagement. These figures are almost always self-reported. Independent audits are rare. Nobody's checking the math because nobody wants to know the real answer.

The fraud has become structural. Businesses build entire strategies around inflated metrics they know are garbage. Advertisers pay premium rates for eyeballs that don't exist. Everyone pretends the emperor has clothes because admitting otherwise would collapse the whole system.

Social media platforms have every incentive to keep the charade going. Higher user counts mean higher valuations. More engagement means more ad revenue. Whether those users are real becomes irrelevant when the stock price keeps climbing.

The bots themselves have gotten sophisticated. They don't just spam the same message over and over anymore. Modern automation mimics human behavior patterns. They pause between actions. They follow realistic browsing paths. They generate content that passes for genuine engagement.

This makes detection nearly impossible at scale. Platforms can't distinguish between a dedicated human user and a well-programmed bot without significant investment in verification systems. That investment cuts into profit margins. So the bots keep multiplying.

The implications stretch beyond annoying comment sections. Political discourse gets manipulated by automated accounts pushing specific narratives. Product reviews are flooded with fake opinions. Dating apps are stuffed with profiles designed to keep real users engaged just long enough to renew their subscriptions.

Every corner of the internet has been compromised by machines pretending to be people. The line between authentic and artificial has blurred beyond recognition.

The rise of artificial intelligence has accelerated the problem. Generative AI tools have lowered the barrier for creating bots, allowing less technical users to deploy automated scripts. The technology uses web scraping and crawling to feed training models while making bot development accessible to anyone with basic prompting skills.

Financial services, healthcare, and e-commerce face the most sophisticated attacks. These industries rely on APIs for critical operations and sensitive transactions, making them prime targets for automated fraud. Account takeover attacks use malicious bots to gain unauthorized access through credential stuffing, leading to identity theft and financial losses.

When you're debating politics with a stranger at two in the morning, there's a better-than-even chance you're screaming into a void. That perfectly formatted counterargument might have been generated in milliseconds by an algorithm designed to keep you angry and engaged.

The machine doesn't care about winning the argument. It just needs you to keep typing.

@Santitos

@salinasmariasantos

Copyright © 2026 Maria Santos Salinas for FRONTeras.