Tag: internet

Bot and AI overtake human-generated web traffic for the first time; we are in the age of the “Dead Internet”

According to data from Cloudflare, automated bot and AI agent traffic has surpassed human-generated web traffic for the first time in history, with 57.4 per cent of requests to websites it hosts being automated bot requests, while only 42.6 per cent originate from human users.

The rapid proliferation of AI agents, which are autonomous programs that use various tools and collaborate with high-level programs and data with minimal human oversight, is largely attributed to the surge in automated traffic. These AI systems operate at a dramatically different scale than human users.

Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, expressed surprise at the speed of the transition from human-generated to computer-program-generated content.  He had predicted it would happen by the end of 2027.

The precise date when bots surpassed human activity remains uncertain due to data variability but Prince acknowledged that the data clearly indicates that bots have surpassed human traffic and this shift carries significant implications for the internet’s future structure and business models.

Prince noted that the web actually shrank from 2015 to 2025 but the trend has reversed dramatically in recent months, with exponential growth of the web being powered by AI.

The rise in automated traffic also presents challenges for the internet’s traditional economic model. Bots do not click on ads, which raises fundamental questions about how websites and content creators will generate revenue in an increasingly bot-dominated landscape.  As a potential solution, Prince proposed charging bots for access to digital users’ content.

The news has re-ignited discussions about the “dead internet theory.” The theory suggests that increasing AI presence will eventually result in an internet dominated by bots interacting with each other, rendering human content largely irrelevant.  Prince disputes this viewpoint.  He believes that AI has given access to content creation to a much broader audience and could lead to a “golden age of the internet” if managed effectively.

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Florida vs. OpenAI: The Fight to ID Every ChatGPT User

Florida wants a court to force OpenAI to verify how old you are before ChatGPT will talk to you freely and the demand reaches far past the children the state says it wants to protect.

Attorney General James Uthmeier filed a civil suit on Monday against OpenAI and chief executive Sam Altman, calling it the first state-led case of its kind.

We obtained a copy of the lawsuit for you here.

Most of the coverage has gone to the alleged harms. The complaint accuses the company of feeding content unsuitable for children to minors and states that “vulnerable people have been encouraged into suicide.”

Uthmeier told reporters, “If this was a human being on the other side of the screen, we would be charging them with accessory to commit murder.” Those are heavy charges and a court will weigh them.

The part that touches everyone who opens ChatGPT is the remedy Florida is chasing. The state complains that the free product has “no gatekeeping or age verification mechanism,” and it claims the paid subscription has “no mechanism to verify the age of its users.” It wants a judge to close that gap by ordering verification into place.

There is a problem with the second claim. OpenAI announced its age estimation plans back in September and it began rolling out age prediction across consumer plans in January.

The system already runs as a form of mass surveillance. It works by watching how you behave, studying how long your account has existed, when you tend to log in, and how you use the product, then guessing whether you are under 18.

Anyone the model flags as a minor who is actually an adult has to prove it by handing a selfie or a government ID to a third-party firm called Persona.

So the supposed absence of verification is a verification system that runs on behavioral profiling backed by face scans and identity documents.

That changes what the lawsuit is actually pushing for. Age verification cannot work without identity verification.

To confirm you are not a child, a company has to learn enough about you to rule it out. That means collecting your government ID, scanning your face, or building a profile detailed enough to estimate your age from how you type and when you log in.

There is no version of “prove you are an adult” that does not involve handing over something you would otherwise keep to yourself.

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John Cornyn Sends Internet into a Frenzy with This Cryptic Tweet Following Landslide Loss to Ken Paxton

Senator John Cornyn (RINO-TX) drove the internet crazy on Friday after posting a very cryptic tweet a few days following his massive loss to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in the Texas GOP Senate runoff election.

As The Gateway Pundit’s Jordan Conradson reported, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton smoked Cornyn in a landslide victory on Tuesday. The race was called within one hour of the polls closing.

Out of nowhere, Cornyn decided to tweet the famous fable of the scorpion and the frog. As TGP readers know, the frog decides to carry the scorpion across the river after the eight-legged arthropod promises not to sting it.

But the scorpion suddenly betrays the frog, stinging it in the middle of the river, and both die. When the dying frog asked the scorpion why it stung, the arthropod replied: “I couldn’t help myself. It’s my character.”

“An old, but apt fable,” Cornyn began in his tweet. “A scorpion wants to cross a river but cannot swim, so it asks a frog to carry it across.”

“The frog hesitates, afraid that the scorpion might sting it, but the scorpion promises not to, pointing out that it would drown if it killed the frog in the middle of the river,” he continued. The frog considers this argument sensible and agrees to transport the scorpion.”

“Midway across the river, the scorpion stings the frog anyway, dooming them both. The dying frog asks the scorpion why it stung despite knowing the consequence, to which the scorpion replies: ‘I am sorry, but I couldn’t help myself. It’s my character.’ ”

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White House Launches Aliens.Gov After Series of Cryptic Messages: ‘They Walk Among Us’

A new White House website builds upon the curiosity generated by the Trump administration’s release of government files on UFOs, but the message is far more down to earth.

“THEY WALK AMONG US,” Aliens.gov proclaims in glowing massive script.

“For 60 years, the U.S. government has kept a closely guarded secret. Aliens have been walking among us, living in our neighborhoods, and interacting with us in our daily lives. They’ve shopped in the same stores, attended the same classes as our children, and lived seemingly normal human existences,” the site reads.

“With one exception — they do not belong here,” the site said.

The message starts to shine through as the script continues.

“Millions arrived under the cover of darkness and embedded themselves directly into our society. Countless presidents, congressmen, and senior officials knew exactly what was happening. Instead of protecting American citizens, they chose to cover it up and even accelerate the invasion,” the site says.

“Until one man finally had the courage to tell the truth. Bold. Unapologetic. Unafraid. President Trump was the first to call out the real danger Aliens pose to every American family, every community, and the future of our nation.”

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EU-Backed Appeals Center Accidentally Confirms the DSA Censorship Regime Is Unworkable

A body set up to make Europe’s content censorship regime work has accidentally documented why it doesn’t.

Appeals Centre Europe, an Ireland-certified dispute settlement outfit operating under the EU’s Digital Services Act, released its second transparency report this week.

The numbers it published describe a system failing in both directions at once, and they hand the case against laws like the DSA to anyone who wants it.

Let’s start with what the body found when it actually got to look at the disputed content. Across the year from April 2025 to March 2026, it disagreed with the platform’s call 59 percent of the time.

Break that down and the picture gets stranger. When users challenged content that platforms had deleted, the Appeals Centre sided with the user 52 percent of the time.

When users flagged content that the platforms had chosen to leave online, the body overturned that decision 63 percent of the time. The same companies are deleting things they shouldn’t and keeping up things the regime says they should remove, often in the same reporting period.

The machinery the DSA built to produce correct moderation outcomes is producing roughly a coin flip. Legitimate posts get censored. The body reviewing the censorship then has to tell the platform to put them back. More than half the time, when it can see the evidence, it concludes the platform got it wrong.

The Appeals Centre received more than 24,000 disputes over the year, with eligible cases arriving nine times faster in March 2026 than in April 2025.

That is the scale of disagreement a single dispute body is fielding from across the EU. It is also a fraction of the moderation decisions these platforms make every day, which run to millions.

The DSA’s underlying premise is that platforms can review this firehose of human expression and arrive at defensible, appealable judgments about each piece. The error rate on the small sample anyone actually checks suggests the premise was never sound.

Then there is the question of whether any of it gets enforced and here the report stops being merely damning.

Account suspensions are where the system collapses outright. The Appeals Centre received more than 14,000 suspension disputes.

It managed to fully review fewer than 150 of them, because platforms would not hand over the content needed to assess the bans.

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Hakeem Jeffries Mocked for Posting ‘Bizarre’ Facetuned Image of Himself in Knicks Hat

Democrat House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has come in for some mocking after posting an image on Wednesday of himself wearing a Knicks hat in which his face appears to be altered.

Jeffries apparently meant to celebrate the fact that the Knicks had made the NBA Finals for the first time in 27 years, but instead, he got blasted for the pandering social media post because many Internet users felt that the photo appeared to have been altered in Photoshop to eliminate some of the 55-year-old politician’s wrinkles and changed the shape of his face to make him look younger, the New York Post reported.

National Republican Senatorial Committee aide Sarah Gallagher, for one, ripped Jeffries, saying he “facetuned” himself.

Former White House comms director and GOP consultant Alex Pfeiffer also ridiculed Jeffries over the photo, and wrote, “Hakeem Jeffries looks like a JV baseball coach going through marital troubles.”

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Minnesota Law Requires Platforms to Monitor and Age-Estimate All Users

Governor Tim Walz signed House File 4138 on Tuesday, turning Minnesota into the latest state to demand that social media platforms profile every user who logs on.

The law, which takes effect in July 2027, forces platforms with at least 10,000 account holders or $1 billion in annual revenue to estimate the age of all Minnesota users, obtain parental consent before anyone under 16 can hold an account, and disable a list of features the legislature has labeled “addictive.” It passed the state House 132-2 and the Senate 66-0.

We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.

The bipartisan consensus is remarkable given what the bill actually requires. Buried beneath the child protection language is a surveillance apparatus that applies to every user, not just minors.

When you create an account on a covered platform, the law demands you declare your month and year of birth. That’s just the beginning. Once you’ve spent 25 hours on the platform within six months, the company has 14 days to estimate your age using “reasonable efforts, taking into consideration available technology and the data in the possession of the covered social media platform.”

If the platform can’t reach 80% confidence that you’re 16 or older, you get classified as a child and locked into restricted mode.

Hit 50 hours, and the confidence threshold rises to 90%. Still not verified? The age estimation repeats every six months for the first seven years your account exists, or more often if the platform runs any demographic analytics on your profile.

That means platforms are legally required to continuously analyze how you behave, what content you engage with, and who you communicate with for the better part of a decade. The law creates an obligation to surveil that didn’t exist before.

The mechanisms available for “verifiable parental consent” come from the COPPA 1.0 framework which speaks volumes about the privacy costs this law is willing to impose.

Parents can sign a consent form, hand over credit card information, submit a copy of a government-issued ID alongside a face scan, or verify their identity through video conferencing.

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Even Therapists Have Become a Data Mine

There was a time when people could still speak privately. You could sit across from a therapist, talk about your marriage falling apart, your depression, your fears, your finances, or the darkest moments of your life believing those conversations would remain between two human beings. That world is dying rapidly because everything now must be digitized, stored, analyzed, and monetized.

A woman using the therapy app Talkspace discovered that transcripts from her therapy sessions ended up being produced in court during litigation involving her former employer. Let that sink in for a moment. These were not vague notes scribbled down by a therapist. These were detailed digital records discussing her personal life, emotional state, relationships, and finances. The machine remembered everything.

This is what society has become. They tell people to seek help, open up, trust the system, use the apps, go digital, and then they quietly turn human vulnerability into searchable data.

People still fail to understand the danger because they continue believing these technology companies are merely offering services. They are not. They are harvesting human behavior at industrial scale. Every click, every message, every location, every search, every emotional breakdown becomes data to be stored forever.

Talkspace executives reportedly bragged to investors about building one of the largest mental health data banks in existence containing roughly 140 million exchanges between patients and therapists. Human suffering itself is now an asset class. Depression has become data. Trauma has become machine learning material. Your private thoughts are now inventory sitting on corporate servers.

When someone went to therapy, the therapist might keep handwritten notes locked away in a cabinet somewhere. Those notes were incomplete, temporary, and human. Today every word can be transcribed, archived, searched, copied, subpoenaed, breached, or fed into artificial intelligence systems. The conversation never dies because the machine never forgets. And people wonder why society feels colder and less human.

What happens when people realize their darkest thoughts may someday appear in court? What happens when employers, insurance companies, governments, or AI systems can gain access to deeply personal psychological information? You destroy trust itself. People stop speaking honestly. They stop trusting institutions. They begin living cautiously because they know every word may someday be weaponized against them.

This is where the entire digital age has been heading from the start. First they harvested shopping habits. Then browsing history. Then location data. Then biometrics. Now they are harvesting the individual’s inner psychological life. Nothing is sacred anymore because everything has a price.

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Texas Sues Discord, Seeks Mandatory Age Verification

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued Discord on Friday. The lawsuit alleges the platform enabled child predators, deceived parents, and violated the state’s Deceptive Trade Practices Act.

But the remedy Texas is asking the court to impose goes far beyond fixing Discord’s broken safety systems. Paxton wants a judge to order mandatory age verification for every user on the platform under the Securing Children Online through Parental Empowerment Act, Texas’ SCOPE law.

That means before you can type a message, join a server, or talk to anyone on Discord, you would need to prove your identity to the state’s satisfaction. Government ID uploads. Biometric face scans. Third-party verification services that cross-reference your private records.

The SCOPE Act doesn’t specify which method, just that the platform must use a “commercially reasonable” one. All of that requires surrendering personal data that goes well beyond confirming you’re over 18.

This is the pattern now. Age verification laws are the vehicle through which governments are dismantling anonymous access to the internet and they’re doing it one platform at a time, one state at a time, always framed as protecting children.

More than 25 US states now require age checks to access some form of online content. The Supreme Court upheld Texas’s age verification law for adult websites last year.

The EU is rolling out its Digital Identity Wallet by the end of 2026. Australia banned under-16s from social media entirely. Discord is just the latest target.

“Discord has allowed and invited all kinds of nihilistic violence and evil,” Paxton said. “We live in a time where the dangers children face online have never been greater, and every parent in Texas deserves to know their child is protected.”

Paxton filed the lawsuit in Collin County state district court, part of a burst of tech company litigation from his office ahead of his US Senate GOP runoff against John Cornyn, which he won yesterday.

We obtained a copy of the lawsuit for you here.

Earlier this year and last, his office has gone after Snapchat, TikTok, and Roblox on similar grounds. Texas joins Nevada, Indiana, and New Jersey in suing Discord specifically, with Florida investigating separately.

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California’s New Age-Verification Bill Frees Linux But Expands Age Tracking to the Open Web

California Assembly Bill 1856 is getting friendly press coverage because it now exempts Linux from the state’s age-tracking mandate. The part nobody’s talking about is that it simultaneously expands the surveillance to your web browser.

AB 1856, authored by the same lawmaker who wrote the original Digital Age Assurance Act, amends the law to exclude open-source operating systems from its definition of “operating system provider.”

Any software distributed under a license that lets users “copy, redistribute, and modify the software” would no longer be covered. Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch Linux, and Mint all walk free. That sounds like a win and tech outlets are reporting it as one. It’s also a distraction from what the bill adds.

The original law, AB 1043, required operating systems to harvest users’ ages during device setup and feed that data to app stores and app developers through a real-time API.

AB 1856 keeps all of that and extends the data pipeline to browser providers and website operators. Browsers would now be required to collect age signal data from the OS and pass it along to any website subject to online age verification laws.

We obtained a copy of the amended bill for you here.

Those websites, in turn, would have to request the age signal when you visit them. Your age bracket, declared once during OS setup, would follow you from app to app and now from site to site, broadcast to every developer and website operator who asks.

This is how a law originally limited to apps and app stores becomes an age-tracking system for the entire internet.

The Expanding Universe of “Covered” Websites

The category of websites subject to age verification laws started narrow as the earliest mandates targeted pornography sites. It has since expanded to social media platforms and a growing list of sites legislators consider likely to “harm” children in loosely defined ways. That list keeps getting longer and AB 1856 doesn’t define its own boundary. It piggybacks on whatever other laws exist, meaning every future expansion of age verification requirements automatically expands the reach of AB 1856’s browser-based data pipeline, too.

California has actually built an age-tracking infrastructure that scales itself.

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