The internet started as a means of communication and connection between people for various reasons and has changed since its inception, but maybe not evolved.

Since the pandemic, people, especially teenagers, have been hooked on their phones. Scrolling through social media posts with thousands of comments and millions of likes pop up everywhere, but it isn’t the same as it was. Most everyone has had an experience where they see a funny post on Instagram, Twitter, or any variety of social media, only to be greeted by copy-and-paste comments ranging from dropshipping advertisements to engagement baiting.

But this experience has only occurred more often in recent years. According to multiple studies, the amount of bots has gone up, and the engagement rate they receive has also gone way up in the past 4 years. These bots not only hurt the quality of the app but also affect users on a very serious level. While before, you could count on a post’s engagement being driven by real people with their own opinions, nowadays bots can force certain posts or comments onto your front page. 

What does this mean?

It means that instead of having real videos or posts that are talked about by real people and pushed by real people, streaming bots, and repost bots push content that is favorable to your screens. Senior at PVHS and longtime Twitter user, Cooper Swihart, says that the problem is the worst it’s been in years, “I used to be able to scroll through my [For You]page and just see the tweets that were recommended and had a lot of people talking about them, but now I’ll see posts with tens of thousands of likes and five comments and completely unrelated to anything I normally see of my timeline.” 

Twitter especially when considering bots has had an influx of politicized content that has been pushed by content farms and bots that repost controversial videos purely to bait engagement. Rather than trying to make insightful critique the bots’ purpose is instead to seek to divide people for the money they bring to their creators.

Aedan Burkhart, also a Senior, says that he noticed that a lot of the videos he saw on his timeline were reposted multiple times with different captions each time, seemingly to agitate users into a frenzy, “I see videos from different accounts with different captions of a fight, trying to make it racial or something else and they’re always trying to get people mad at everyone else.”

This change represents a serious problem, with real effects on teenagers and social media users in general. These bots pushed by greedy companies and people represent a ticking time bomb that could eventually cause the implosion of all social media.