Following a report on the situation with Social Media and bots, Lewis Stuart of University of Nottingham is inspired to see just how easy it is to fire up his own botnet and puts them to work on a fake social media site: 'scroll hole.' 

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37% of all internet traffic is now attributed to malicious bots, according to Imperva's Bad Bot Report. This video explains how social media botnets (sock puppet accounts) work, how AI and LLMs have dramatically improved their ability to generate convincing posts, images, and contextually relevant comments, and demonstrates this with a custom mock social media platform called Scrollhole. The demo shows bots generating alien invasion disinformation content and gaslighting users with realistic replies. The video also explores the arms race between bot detection and increasingly human-like bots, raising the 'dead internet theory' — the idea that online spaces may eventually be dominated by bots talking to bots, making detection practically impossible without also blocking real users.

Bad Bot Problem - Computerphile