bots are ruining your ability to have original opinions

here’s how to keep your own opinions in a room full of borrowed ones.

have you ever watched a reel you thought was cute and wholesome, then opened the comments and found a pile of people explaining how it’s actually racist or homophobic or toxic, and suddenly you’re just sitting there confused about what you even feel about the whole thing?

that right there. that little wobble. that’s how easily we get influenced by other people’s opinions. we live in a world where everyone and their grandmother has a stage and half the audience isn’t even human. we can abandon whole belief systems in the time it takes to scroll a comment section, just based on how the world seems to be perceiving something.

ft. my fav meme

now imagine that exact phenomenon being weaponised against you, both to make you buy things and believe things.

that’s what bots are doing to us.

the comment section is never neutral

so the mechanism, is almost embarrassingly simple. a bunch of glowing comments raving about how amazing a product is on a brand’s reel will quietly make you more likely to trust it. that’s social proof doing its thing. and a flood of negative comments on something completely innocent will make you start believing those opinions must hold some truth, because hey, if this many people agree, there’s gotta be something to it, right?

except a lot of those people aren’t people.

this is the part that genuinely unsettled me when i looked it up. in 2025, bots accounted for 53% of all global web traffic. now the number is 57%. for the first time in history, the machines have outnumbered us. malicious bots alone made up 40% of traffic, almost matching actual humans at 47%. so the next time you read a comment section and feel the herd forming, remember that a meaningful chunk of the herd is software.

Bit Vs. Human traffic for 2026. Source: https://radar.cloudflare.com/traffic#bot-vs-human

and they’re built to be persuasive. research analysing around 200 million users found that bots lean heavily on linguistic cues that are easy to automate, like hashtags and relentlessly positive language, which is exactly the kind of frictionless enthusiasm that makes a product feel beloved or a target feel universally hated.

the reviews lie too

it isn’t just comments. the reviews you trust before buying anything are riddled with the same problem. on average, around 30% of online reviews are considered fake, and on some major platforms that figure climbs as high as 47%. which matters enormously, because 95% of internet users check reviews before buying, and reviews are trusted as social proof roughly twelve times more than any other form of marketing.

so the single thing we lean on most to feel confident in a decision is also one of the easiest things in the world to fake. AI-generated reviews have been growing about 80% month over month since mid-2023. the fake confidence is being mass produced.

now scale it up to your government and beyond

if bots can nudge you toward a moisturiser, they can absolutely nudge you toward a worldview. and this is where it stops being funny.

within 48 hours of the 2024 assassination attempt on Donald Trump, a disinformation analysis found that 45% of the profiles pushing one particular false narrative were bots, reaching a potential 595 million people. as one analyst put it, the fake accounts were live within minutes, pushing a completely false story, and they were genuinely successful at hijacking the conversation. that’s not spam. as one industry CEO bluntly described it, these bots are changing how we feel about things and how we think about things.

this is how mainstream noise quietly brainwashes us out of having original thoughts. you stop forming opinions based on facts and start forming them based on what a crowd, possibly an automated one, appears to believe.

a quick defence of changing your mind

now, to be fair, there’s a flip side.

i actually think being a “hypocrite” is not nearly as bad as it’s made out to be(and nikhil kamath influenced me to have this opinion, case in point). believing something completely different a year from now isn’t a character flaw. it’s growth. it means you stayed open to new information and new perspectives, which is the entire point of having a brain that isn’t a bot’s. changing your mind because you learned something is good.

what i’m talking about is the opposite of that. it’s changing your mind because the comment section told you to. blindly absorbing whatever the majority appears to be saying, without any real knowledge or skin in the game, doesn’t make you open-minded. it just makes you an NPC.

sooo here’s what I ask of you

tbh this post isn’t really as much about bots or propaganda as much as it is about having original thought. i’m by no means telling you to become an ultracrepidarian. that’s someone who confidently gives an opinion on things they know nothing about btw(forgive me for showing off new words i’ve been learning :P).

but don’t be quick to form an opinion, especially on anything to do with politics or world affairs. do your research. take a literal moment to ask yourself whether what you’re feeling is coming from actual facts, or from a reel and the mood of its comment section.

don’t be a blind consumer. in a world with unlimited content and the entire planet handed a stage to broadcast its opinions, your ability to discern is the most valuable thing you own. so hold onto it. and above everything else, be mindful of what you consume.

because somewhere out there, there is a bot, probably coded by someone sitting in russia, whose entire job is to change how you feel about your own government. or the other way around. don’t give them the satisfaction.

think for yourself. it’s getting rare. that’s exactly why it’s worth it.