The Dead Internet theory is an online conspiracy theory that suggests that the internet has been largely controlled by bot activity and algorithmic curation to manipulate the population and minimize human activity. This theory has gained more weight due to the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots and agents. Conspiracy theories have been around for centuries, but with the rise of the internet, their spread has accelerated and their power has grown.
Psychologists’ research offers insight into why people put faith in conspiracy theories such as QAnon. Conspiracy theories are unfounded, deeply held alternative explanations for events or situations that assert the existence of a conspiracy by powerful and sinister groups, often political. The rise of the internet has fuelled these theories in new ways and enables the deepening of conspiracy theorising in some online contexts.
Conspiration theories have legitimized violence, impaired public health, and undermined democratic governance. Containing their harms begins with various factors, such as psychological biases and distrust of official sources. Recent events, such as the election of Donald Trump, the U.S. Capitol riot, and several conspiracy theory-inspired mass shootings, have prompted further exploration of how conspiracies spread and why we believe them.
In conclusion, conspiracy theories have always been present in our society, but the rise of the internet has accelerated their spread and power. Understanding the origins, persistence, and effects of belief in conspiracy theories can help us better understand the complex nature of these beliefs and their potential consequences.
📹 It’s All FAKE | The Dead Internet Theory
What if all of our online existence is fake? You, me, everyone; we’re living in a real-life Matrix. Designed to distract us from the …
📹 Why we are all attracted to conspiracy theories
Recently,QAnon, Covid-19and5Gtheories have gained traction and criticism while less controversial conspiracies like thefaked …
Please don’t give up on this website, I am surprised how few subs you have given the absolute fantastic quality of your content and I will continue to share your website all over. I’m not even saying this to be nice, you’re one of the few YouTubers that actually holds my attention and picks interesting topics. -Edit *If people are confused, I wrote this comment when this website only had around 15k subs. It’s wholesome to see this website blow up, and it’s very well deserved. Congratulations!
I don’t use Facebook or any other social media except YouTube. I work from home and one day found myself scrolling for hours on Facebook, and realised how much time I was wasting. I don’t actually miss it and I thought I would. I can’t give up YouTube though – and miss out on websites like this? No way.😀
I’m absolutely blown away by your content. I wish I could donate a bit more and I will, little and often, because this is by far the most engaging website I’ve stumbled on in years. The value in your articles is priceless and to be honest, anybody who can stop me strolling through life to stop and do a bit thinking for myself already has it nailed! Keep up the great work!
It would explain why there seems to be an absolute dearth of original ideas or conversation happening. I’ve noticed that it’s really turned into a really weird echo chamber sort of thing, and I’ve honestly wondered the effect it’s had on our entertainment. It’s around the same time that we suddenely started seeing a ton of re-makes and stuff like that.
It is soooo refreshing and encouraging how you wade right into subjects that are pretty outlandish, some of which definitely require a tinfoil hat, but you don’t come off as condescending or sanctimonious, just interesting and entertaining. I was skeptical of your content at first but when you didn’t hesitate to declare that climate change is real I didn’t hesitate to subscribe.
This was great. I’m going into cyber security. It is crazy the capabilities that computers and machines have gained since I was a kid with a gameboy to games appearing realistic or hyper realistic. These fake online accounts are used for all kinds of cyber crimes, from phishing and identity theft to swindling. It’s a really powerful tool and it’s already been greatly abused.
My man you deserve your own time slot on national TV. You are producing the best content on the internet. Professionally delivered in an entertaining manner with extreme amounts of research and production. Kids can watch and adults are completely enthralled. Your amazing friend and I truly appreciate your hard work and incredible product.
I believe this is one of the most entertaining and informative websites I have ever come across on YouTube. AJ is a wonderful storyteller and Hecklefish is a gas. I have watched lots of episodes in the past two weeks. I make sure to like comment and share every article. Involving the audience to offer up topics for the next show is one of the most brilliant ideas ever. It totally immerses the viewer to enjoy every minute. The research and time to create this wonderful content must be painstaking, alas the content you offer is the absolute best this platform has to offer. With dignity and hilarity you captivate the minds with every syllable.Thank You
I watch 100% of all your articles and your content is not just entertaining but super thought provoking and I actually think in the last two days I’ve watched about around three articles or more back to back every time I sign on. The commercial breaks are strange because I have a premium version of YouTube and I don’t have to watch those things.
Speaking from my own personal experiences, this sounds accurate. My band had Facebook ads when we first started. Got to over 50k likes. A negligible amount of that were actual people who interacted with posts. I wonder how much of this is back room deals by Facebook themselves to inflate numbers to increase ad revenue.
I used to be an instagram fitness influencer and came across fake accounts over and over again. I know the numbers rise daily of computer generated acocunts & it trily is a scary thing. Much scarier than i had inagined after perusal this article. Thanks to you and your team for all your hard work in researching and presenting such good content.
I admit that I don’t always watch 100%. I usually stick around long enough to hear “you are appreciated,” (and thank you so much for that sentiment) before I click on. I’m gonna change that now. I really love your formula/presentation of giving the story its full effect and making us (the audience) uneasy and then going into further explanations, which don’t always allay our unease.
Man I love this website! Your articles are always so well put together. I’m always impressed with the amount of research and work you put into these. It’s easy to make articles on the types of topics on your website, but it’s not easy to keep these topics fun and interesting. You have a top notch website my dude. Thanks for all of your hard work.
Great article! I’m definitely seeing the AI content take-over. If it’s not entirely AI spewing content it’s human content-creators using AI to generate content that an AI has advised them to spew based on metrics that AI is itself influencing. It’s one big pile of “trends” just flowing around maximized for profits. There’re no real conversations anymore, everything is monologues and opinions thrown into the abyss. I hope to see more of your content in the future regarding AI and its ramifications. Thank you for reading.
I absolutely love your website sir! Hecklefish is definitely my spirit animal. I hope you continue to post and aren’t planning to shutdown your website because it’s literally all I watch now on YouTube lol. Ok not gonna get long-winded here so just please keep it up and thank you again for everything!
I am 100% human, and I love your articles! I sure hope you’re human and not part of the dead internet. I’m a writer, and have had a difficult time justifying continuing to write, due to the imminent apocalypse. The fact that you still spread your opinions freely over the internet (and are allowed to do so) gives me small hope that my message doesn’t go on ignored. Thank you very much for the knowledge you impart to us all!
I watch and then re-watch so many of your articles and I always hear something new that I didn’t pay attention to before and they’re always thought-provoking things I appreciate your website so very much and I always look forward to your new content I love the little snippets you and heckle fish create together
This website is AMAZING! The hours of work that go into your presentations must be huge! WELL DONE A.J.! The perfect mix of information intertwined with Hecklefish humour is pure genius. I look forward to spending many hours catching up on the articles I haven’t yet seen. For once, I’m glad I’m an insomniac! I pray that you are REAL……
Easily my new favorite website. I’ve binge watched all but 2 episodes. Seeing you tweak the process here and there is awesome, the show gets better and better. Titer end of the year 2022 article was great too. The wife and I watched it together. Keep up the great work. Can you do a article on the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis?
This was a truly scary article!! Btw, me and my family absolutely love this website…❤❤❤❤❤❤ We think you and Heckelfish are so awesome… Please keep making articles for us all, with the same type of content. I think it’s super important for people to be aware of the information that the government or other people in power definitely don’t want us to be aware of…On this subject, could you do a article on our news corporations being controlled or manipulated by the government as to the content and viewpoint they report on??
When you mentioned the Fake persons, Heckle-fish was pointing at you, when you were not looking. Are you sure he’s got your back? On a serious note, I love your work. I intend to send you a short note with a few facts in it for you to have a look at It’s sensitive and downright scary. Letter will be sent from Australia.
Enjoyed the article and the content. Ai is definitely something crazy to think about. Since you were mentioning the algorithm for your website, I will say that using the logo to separate the sections of the article kept having me wonder if it was over or not. If I was less interested I might have stopped perusal. Maybe doing some text headers for the sections could help. Again, great article. Thanks for sharing.
I found this website about two years ago and honestly It’s my favourite website on YouTube I’ve watched every single episode some more then once. The fact that u dive into a bunch of topics a lot of ppl don’t know about like this topic in this article I didn’t know most of this a lot of others episodes I knew about the topics but some of them i learned much more
I’m not a bot but sometimes I click on a train instead of a bus and question my existence. Also I saw another YouTuber cover this topic and it was so bad, you explained it way better. And IG is flooded with “virtual influencers,” plenty of them have it in their bio now. Straight up computer generated women making the beauty standard literally inhuman.
The recycling of content can also be found in magazines. I subscribed for well over a decade to an outdoor/hunting magazine. I gave up on the subscription after finding more and more ads, many of which began reading like legitimate articles, and realizing the content being covered was re-written articles on the same subject from the year prior.
I remember being in that very thread on this certain website back then. And tbh in recent years i felt that the internet in general changed. And not for the better. Discussions on various websites, user generated content and general online interaction have this different feel to it when compared to the late 2000s/early 2010s.
Hi AJ ~ I’ve loved every article of yours that I’ve had the pleasure of perusal so far. You are bright, intelligent, well-informed and entertaining all throughout; but this is the first one that actually made me nervous. I became nervous about all this and then thought to myself, “Just stay real. That’s all you can do. That’s all any of us can do. Just be as real as possible in an increasingly unreal world. That’s how we fight back.” With all my heart, I thank you (The article Creator) for being real with me (The Viewer) when you create these many astounding articles.
Recently found your website and I’m really enjoying the content, thanks for the hard work that goes into these. It’s so sad that we are so manipulated in our daily lives now. The worst part is that most just don’t know or care. They should. In the good old days we could use the net to beat the system. In recent years the net has become the system. Where too from here?
AI and vr have ALWAYS freaked me out. I liked the movie “ready player one”, but when I brought up the fact that we’d be living in it in the next 50 years or less, I got told I was exaggerating. I’m honestly scared for the future, but I’m glad to be informed. The article was great, if not a little bit depressing.
The problem is not the AI itself. The problem is the people who don’t care. Just like you said, followers of an AI model on insta increased despite knowing it’s an AI, that’s the real problem. People like these little gratifications. They are willing to trade anything for it. Exactly like “Cypher” in the movie The Matrix. There are millions if not billions of them like “Cypher” in the real world even in your close families.
Speaking as a software developer, AI has always fascinated me and I’ve tinkered with neural networks and fuzzy logic etc… I do think there’s a place for it in science and medical research. However, AI is being pushed far too fast which I think is incredibly dangerous. Only recently, a news article reported an artist named ‘Saint Von Colucci’ died during Cosmetic Surgery. That story was in fact AI generated and the papers thought it was real. When bad actors utilise AI (and they probably already doing it) it will become almost impossible for people to tell fact from fiction and I am very concerned about our future with this technology.
What in the actual fizz-knuckle?!?!? As usual man, your website has managed to help push me further into some fear based psychosis where I find myself hoarding guns, ammunition, non perishable foods, and “trusted” friends lol… If I happen to survive the earths axis rotation event, I guess I can only hope to keep my cat alive with me so that together, we can begin to reestablish the world after the 7th day. Good stuff man. Thanks for all your hard work.
Absolutely love this website! You cover so many topics that have always peaked my interests and you tell it in the most interesting way. At first I thought Hecklefish was a gimmick, but now I see his purpose and his humor. The dynamic between the two personalities allows for a more neutral view without being too political. Keep making content and I’ll keep supporting your work!
AJ, you are the only safe conspiracy theory website to watch. AI has absolutely exploded in the last year since you made this article. It will be fascinating to see what the next 10 years bring. I haven’t watched all your articles, so maybe you made one about this. What about an episode about what caused civilization resets and what the likelihood of another one on the horizon?
It’s great to see this website is already over 500k subs. Again excellent job with bringing the story, research and jokes. The part about the drones is quite scary. Probably more scary than the dead internet theory because there are actually robots flying around ready to kill whatever they see as a target.
One of my all time fave episodes. Not a bot! Promise!🤣It was a bit unsettling and has made me rethink how I engage with others out “here”. Question, can these AI be combative? Do they engage with you in a conversation? How can one spot a bot (outside of the innocuous benign comments you referenced)? Asking for a friend.
I was hoping this article would talk about the how search engines are dead (Google says millions of pages found, but limits to a 140 total). Also, I believe it was 2016 researchers saw 95% of the web pages they were researching just disappear. The search engines also limit what you can find based upon political motivations. This seems to allow government and powerful corporations to cover up and suppress information.
I AM NOT A BOT. I watch 100% of these articles at least 95% of the time. The Why files quickly became one of my ALL TIME FAVORITE websites on YouTube, my only regret is that I WISH there was more and that I could get the chance to contribute to the website or even just one episode, that’s how much I LOVE the Why Files’ content. Lol.
I knew a girl near me. She had a Facebook account. But there was also another account… same pics but also other pics… and a completely different career and education history. And she looked slightly different ie slimmer etc in the one with the better history… on her later pics. It made no sense to me. Why fake yourself when everyone living nearby would know you? Or could find the “lesser you”? So… I did wonder whether there was a bot generated version of her.
I happened upon this show on Roku one night and I am addicted to it. I have learned so much. I am frightened by the AI episodes and started researching it myself. It seems like there is a big cover up going on. Is that true? Oh, I love hecklefish!!! How do you learn all this? Anyway, if you read this, please give me some websites I can go to that tells more truth about AI. Thank you for your humor and your knowledge. Love this show.
Thank you for the information. My son told me about this last night so I found your article and watched it. I am curious because this is all new to me and I am not computer savvy when they advertise for a product and you read the comments. Are those AI generated? I’ve always thought they were because they’re comments like this product is fantastic. I just ordered mine. I want morethings I will be subscribing. I appreciate you very much.