My friends, am I really here with you, or is this simply AI producing something for you to watch and trying to brainwash you into thinking a certain way? Is the internet really a vibrant place full of real people creating, or has the internet long been taken over by bots for the purpose of distracting you, making you act a certain way, believe a certain thing, and controlling you? Is the internet run by AI? This came from a very good video I just watched from the Why Files, which is why I've kept the same title and I'm having the same conversation here. It's the most interesting theory I've heard lately, and I'm going to share my experience with it, my firsthand interactions with the bots and the AI.
What the dead internet theory actually claims
If you're new to the dead internet theory, as I am, it suggests that the internet has long been taken over by AI. That a lot of the content created, even the creators you might follow, are not real. They are generated by very intelligent AI. You might be skeptical at first and think, "Well, Jerry, look, we just have ChatGPT today." I went out on ChatGPT and asked it some questions, and this is the technology that's publicly available, and it can be very useful. If you want to learn, this is easier than Google. For example, I asked ChatGPT how many people were killed by police in 2020, and the answer was a thousand. How many abortions were there? An estimated 800,000. I'm able, with ChatGPT, to very quickly get information and put it together in a way that makes sense. I try to encourage people not to get so upset about sensationalized things. A thousand people killed by police, 800,000 abortions, 47,000 suicides, 14,000 murders, all in the same year. Medical errors killing as many as 100,000 people, almost 100,000 killed by alcohol. You can see how powerful this is. Before ChatGPT came along, it would have taken me a while to gather all this different information quickly into one short, very readable, very easy to understand article.
Now, my question is this: if this is what's publicly available, what is available to the richest, most powerful people in the world? What is available in secret government and corporate laboratories that nobody knows about? We've seen in the conspiracy world that so many things once dismissed as conspiracies have now been proven correct. It looks to me like the dead internet theory is dead on, and I'll give you an example firsthand.
What I saw running Facebook ads
I have a Facebook page that's verified with two million followers now. Look at the interaction I get: two likes for a post an hour ago, this one yesterday did better than usual with 13 likes, this one two likes, this one five likes. You might say, "Well, you just post crap, that's why people don't interact with it." I have two million followers because I used Facebook advertising in 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018, for about five years. I ran a lot of Facebook ads on my page and was one of the leading teachers of Facebook advertising online. Back then I had the first bestselling Facebook ads course to hit over a hundred thousand dollars in earnings and something like a quarter million in sales on Udemy, and on my YouTube channel I've had a bunch of popular Facebook advertising tutorials.
Based on my experience with Facebook ads, I can tell you for an absolute fact that a massive amount of traffic on Facebook is all fake. It's bots. Out of the millions of likes on my page, probably at least 1.5 million of them were bots that liked my page from Facebook ads. I ran Facebook ads globally, and Facebook did not crack down on bots. People would run huge bot farms and like a whole bunch of pages, then sell that activity and produce likes for a cost. If they liked all these pages and produced all this fake activity, they could get away with artificially boosting certain content on Facebook.
Now, Facebook has no incentive to stop this. We can ask ChatGPT how much money Facebook made on ads. Maybe it'll tell us, maybe it won't. There, look, it told us: $84 billion. That's what Facebook made in ads in the year 2020. So if we assume conservatively that 10% of Facebook is bots, that would mean Facebook loses at least $8 billion in ad revenue if they crack down on bots. It's clear to me that all these social media companies, especially if you look at Elon Musk on Twitter, where cracking down on bots was one of his first priorities, treat this differently. Facebook clearly has not cracked down on bots, because it will cost them billions of dollars to ban all the bots. And not only that, but how many bots are actually controlled by Facebook? How many bots make sure the content Facebook wants to go viral goes viral? How many bots out there make sure to kill off content and creators, as appears to have happened on my page? You just send a bunch of negative bots through a page, and it kills the engagement on it.
The bots I met on YouTube and Fiverr
I was on YouTube in 2011, and in 2012, when Fiverr was new, I tried buying some views for my YouTube channel, which was not a good idea and proved to be useless. However, in the process of doing that, I would get to know the sellers to try to figure out if they were trustworthy and what kind of bots they used. I optimistically hoped there were real people watching my videos, and it turned out they were always bots. I found one seller who was brutally honest and told me he had the most advanced network of bots on Fiverr, and that big music labels were paying him big money to get millions of fake bot views on their new music videos. That was more than 10 years ago. What do you think has happened since then?
It unfortunately is obvious to me that a lot of the top creators on the internet are there from cheating. There's a lot of pressure and a lot of emphasis people place on these view numbers, and a lot of the most viewed videos and the top creators seem to me to be intentionally manipulated through bots, through fake accounts, and through individuals deciding that we want this person and their message to get popular. In some cases, as covered by the Why Files, there's not even a real person behind the account. In his video, he described how one Instagram account was generated by AI. It looked like there was this girl who was a fashion model going places, wearing these outfits, making these photos, all fake.
Deep fakes and the manipulation of the matrix
We've seen recently, with the emergence of deep fakes, that AI which is publicly available today can create convincing fake images, audio, and video of almost anybody. And that's what's publicly known and available today. I would presume, based on that, that this technology has been around for years, probably five or six years, and it's been heavily manipulating the internet to get certain opinions highlighted and to minimize others, for the purpose of plugging you into a video. It's been able to get you into a matrix, getting you to think a certain way, to vote a certain way, to spend your money a certain way, and unfortunately this is extremely logical.
If you're a parent, if you're a boss, if you're the owner of a company, if you're in any position of power, let me ask you an uncomfortable question. Do you prize independent thinking in the people who work for you, the people collaborating with you, in your children, in your grandchildren? Do you celebrate when someone disagrees with you and is disobedient? I know I'm cultivating that in my kids. I don't want to raise little bots that just do what they're told. I celebrate how my children question everything, and I'm shocked at how often they find little holes in my arguments. Is that how most of us are operating? Or do most of us simply want the people who are under us in one way or another, and some of us think of our spouse as under us, or our kids, or our employees, to do what they're told? How many people in the world are simply operating on the basis of "I want you to do what you're told"?
Now imagine that process and that level of thinking from someone who has enough money to buy an election. From someone who has enough power to decide who lives and dies, who is trying to create a society based on how they think it should work. It's only logical that some of the people with huge amounts of money and power got that way from exploiting other people, and are intending to stay that way by keeping everyone else down.
My own contradictions
My mission in showing up is to help lift all of us up. And yet, I can't help but see that I've made thousands of videos myself on YouTube, and there's one thing all my videos have in common: I'm pretty much always selling and rationalizing whatever I'm doing. If I'm hot on one crypto, I'm promoting that crypto. If I'm doing Google ads, I'm talking Google ads. If I want people to notice my TikTok, I'm making a video about TikTok. You can literally look at my videos where I say things that directly conflict with each other. I make a video talking about how to do YouTube ads, then I make another video saying you should never do YouTube ads and this is why I'm quitting ads. I make a video about how Facebook disabled my ad account, then a newer video showing how I'm doing Facebook ads. What I've noticed is that, unfortunately, it's only logical that we want other people to be like us and to do like us. And so this dead internet theory seems very accurate to me, because based on what I can see now, it seems the internet has been taken over for a long time. And that leads me to, well, what do we do about it?
What I believe we can do: choose authenticity
This is what he didn't address in his video that I wanted to put in here. What do we do? To me, it's to be careful who you listen to. Be careful what you take as gospel, careful about who's telling the truth. This is why I see the value proposition of my channel, and all my channels, as a place of authenticity. It's why I prefer not to edit my videos, and instead just share from the heart. I see that one of the main things missing online is authenticity. When you calculate all the bots just generating content to make a profit, all the manipulated narratives, all the people who are in contracts that don't allow them to express certain opinions, it adds up. When I was a Facebook partner, I had a contract that would not even allow me to talk about the things I was not allowed to talk about. There were very specific things I was not allowed to say. I wanted to be a Facebook partner so bad that I just signed the agreement. While I did make six figures as a result of being a Facebook partner, and I did get my voice out there to a lot of people, as soon as they didn't like what I was saying, they got rid of me and made an example out of me. I'm proud that I got so much of this stuff out there. I managed to talk about what needed to be said.
But I am a bit unlike a lot of other creators. Especially once I saw that Facebook partner contract, I realized that almost all the other Facebook partners cared a lot more about keeping their partner contract than I did. They were willing to completely shut their mouths on certain issues, being good little partners most of the time. And I realized, oh my God, the entire internet has had its mouth zipped up just like this. Most real creators have been forced into creating within a certain set of boundaries. When you combine that with bots, I see there's a huge need for realness and authenticity online today. If this way of looking at the internet resonates with you, and you want to keep learning alongside me, the best way to work with me today is to join the Jerry Banfield Family, where we can talk about all of this honestly and without a contract zipping anyone's mouth shut. You're also welcome to dig deeper into the coaching side of what I do through my YouTube Coaching playlist.
I'm really happy to be able to share this message with you. I've got this main channel and four others, and I would love to keep showing up authentically and to see you again on another video.