Protecting Digital Spaces in a Bot-Driven World

By Ken Griggs— Founder of Julia.social & Creator of not.bot

Thanks to acceleration from AI, the internet reached a tipping point. Today, automated agents outnumber people online. That’s not an abstract fact. It means trust is broken in the digital world we’ve built. 

If you lead a business, run a platform, or simply care about truth in public life, you need to take time to understand the growing impact of AI-generated traffic.

AI-generated bots dominate online traffic and customer interactions

Bots have been with us since the earliest days of online connectivity. Back then, they could do little more than click, but those clicks went a long way. Bots stuffed online surveys to swing outcomes. Rivals unleashed click bots to drain competitors’ budgets. On social networks, bots inflated likes and follows. These were rudimentary scripts, but they worked because the internet rewards volume and speed.

Platforms fought back with CAPTCHAs and behavioral filters, but the defensive line moved. Any puzzle a human can complete in a couple of seconds, a modern bot can now mimic.

Even more alarming is that today’s bots are moving far beyond simple clicks; they’re becoming thought leaders. Researchers at the University of Zurich secretly released bots into Reddit’s Change My View, a forum where people post strongly held beliefs and others try to change their minds, and the takeaways were sobering. Participants couldn’t reliably tell they were interacting with bots. Worse still? The bots were more effective than people at getting users to change their views. 

The warning is clear: bots have moved from attacking platforms to directly targeting the people on them.

The real risks to businesses, elections, and consumer trust if anti-bot technology cannot check the bot flood

For businesses, skewed metrics equal bad decisions and even worse outcomes. Dashboards glow green while real customers churn. When companies can’t trust data, product roadmaps, A/B tests, and brand health metrics all become suspect.

Click bots and fake impressions can bite directly into a business’s revenue. To smear a company’s reputation, these bots can pump out negative reviews, overwhelm customer service, and even impersonate key staff members.

In online spaces, public opinion is no longer trustworthy. Bots inflate likes, follows, views, and “trending” topics all the time. Coordinated bot swarms can make fringe ideas look widely supported, or a brand look hated. A few false posts can look credible when thousands of bot accounts repeat and boost them.

When numbers can be bought, useful posts, genuine reviews, and real engagement get drowned out. People stop believing metrics, and trust shifts from open platforms to closed circles.

Ironically, over half of Americans report getting news from social media, meaning our civic conversation is only as trustworthy as our feeds. And since the internet’s ad‑driven distribution model favors popularity over precision, tireless bots will have the prevailing opinion every time. 

How digital identity verification can protect online spaces from bots 

The goal is simple. Authenticate humans with one question: “Are you a bot or not?” We want to prove a fact, not an identity. Most importantly, we do it in a way that can’t be repurposed as a surveillance machine.

Nowadays, some websites block bots by asking users to scan their government IDs or mobile driver’s licenses. While this type of verification is a powerful “proof of personhood,” it creates more problems than it solves by exposing users to tracking across the web.

In addition, central stores of IDs are called honeypots for a reason — they attract attackers in swarms. Stolen IDs give bad actors all they need to perpetrate identity theft and scams for years. Personal data is extremely valuable, and even tech giants like Google get hacked.

The good news is that two readily available technologies allow people to prove they’re human without revealing their identities. Both zero‑knowledge proofs and multi‑party computation use mathematical proofs to authenticate digital signatures. This unique stamp enables websites to verify users as genuine.

After a one‑time liveness check bound to a trusted authority, users receive a cryptographic credential. The key to these methods is minimal disclosure. Users don’t reveal their names or email addresses. They only reveal that they are human.

This credential can live on a phone’s secure chip. Users control their digital identity on their device, and nothing personal leaves the device during everyday use.

These frameworks can also offer recognizability without linkability. When each proof is fresh, a bot can’t reuse the same proof everywhere, and sites can’t link user activity across the web.

Truth is worth protecting. When engagement is human‑verified and content is signed, the digital space will be able to start rebuilding trust with online users. Businesses will see dashboards that begin to reflect reality, and online communities will see fewer persuasion bots when amplification requires proof.

The future isn’t going to be an internet without bots. But we can build one where being real is easy and being fake is expensive by adopting authenticated digital identity tools that make privacy the top priority.