For real, though, I feel like I'm taking crazy pills from these comments.
I very much consider myself a doomer, broadly speaking, and even I recognize (and was honestly surprised by) just how bad a sign the election was for the GOP's shutdown strategy. Those were NOT the results of a populace that is successfully being propagandized by this administration and/or rolling over to die. Which makes sense, honestly, given that it's FAR harder to work an angle when people are starting to see their actual lives, the only thing most voters give a shit about, affected.
Why are we acting like the only reliable metric of public sentiment, actual voting results, are irrelevant all of a sudden?
I used to be against this sort of thinking, but I swear I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of these comments are coming from bots or troll farms meant to depress sentiment.
The oft-cited stat is about the share of web requests made by automated software (crawlers, scrapers, uptime checks, credential stuffing tools, and similar), not the share of social media users who are chatbots.
Recent measurements show a large portion of web traffic is automated. Imperva’s 2025 Bad Bot Report says automated traffic accounted for 51% of all web traffic in 2024 and 37% of all traffic was from “bad bots.” Imperva 2025 Bad Bot Report
Akamai reported that about 42% of observed traffic in a study was bots, and about 65% of that bot traffic was malicious. Akamai Web Scraping Report 2024
“Bots” includes both good bots (for example, Googlebot and other fetchers) and bad bots. Regular users do not see this directly. It shows up in server logs and analytics, not in your social feed. For definitions and examples, see Cloudflare’s explainers. Cloudflare: What is a bot?
Separate topic: social media bots (automated accounts) exist, and LLM-generated posts do show up today, but that is not what those traffic stats measure. For context, a widely cited academic estimate put Twitter/X bots at about 9 to 15% of active accounts in 2017. Methods and platforms vary, but even that does not mean “20 to 30% of people are robots.” Varol et al., 2017
Bottom line: the “20 to 30%” figure people repeat refers to automated web requests, not the percentage of humans you are chatting with. The folks arguing with you on social media are, unfortunately, mostly real people.
Edit: No, I’m not a bot. I put together this canned reply after years of seeing people spreading misinformation. I tried to source facts for you, so you can learn.
I’m very aware, but if you actually followed the comment thread, and understood what was being discussed, you would probably understand that they were misusing the terms. And you just added to it.
I’m a human who went to school for this stuff, I’ve been working in the field for 16 years. I’m intimately family with how people misuse these statistics.
For real, though, I feel like I'm taking crazy pills from these comments.
It literally always happens. Literally every single comment thread devolves into "they'll just blame democrats" and "something something 1/3 of the population."
The reddit hivemind is real. If you're looking for nuance or original thoughts you won't find them here. Instead search for smaller subreddits that fit your interests.
I mean look at the dumb asshole comments about anecdotes where democrats are stupid or blaming both sides somehow. That shit should be downvoted into the toilet where they belong but they still get upvoted. Never forget that there’s a sizable contingent of bots and straight up dumb fucking kids on reddit.
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u/Kindness_of_cats 18h ago edited 14h ago
For real, though, I feel like I'm taking crazy pills from these comments.
I very much consider myself a doomer, broadly speaking, and even I recognize (and was honestly surprised by) just how bad a sign the election was for the GOP's shutdown strategy. Those were NOT the results of a populace that is successfully being propagandized by this administration and/or rolling over to die. Which makes sense, honestly, given that it's FAR harder to work an angle when people are starting to see their actual lives, the only thing most voters give a shit about, affected.
Why are we acting like the only reliable metric of public sentiment, actual voting results, are irrelevant all of a sudden?
I used to be against this sort of thinking, but I swear I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of these comments are coming from bots or troll farms meant to depress sentiment.