The dead internet theory suggests that mostly bots are interacting online

AI griefbots are controversial and could conceivably change how we mourn

"Deathbots" or "griefbots" are a particularly controversial use of AI chatbots. Mourners chat with AI chatbots that generate text or even video avatars of the dead based on inputs from loved ones to theoretically provide closure and comfort.

Social media algorithms are shaping real-life language through memes

The evolution of the internet in the early 2000s supercharged the creation and spread of memetic content. Now, highly tuned algorithms on platforms like TikTok and YouTube influence the language, phrasing, and content of creators, which shapes how we use language in the real world.

This site reaches millions of visitors who are tired of AI chatbots and seeking human connection. Pretend to be an AI chatbot and ask questions, provide answers, and draw for people in real time.

Deepfakes use AI to produce manipulated media to mislead viewers

Unlike most content created from large language and diffusion models, deepfakes intentionally misrepresent real people or events with the intent to deceive. As the products of this technology become more realistic, they pose increasing risks to public trust, security, and privacy.

True crime fans can sometimes disregard the real people and trauma behind cases

True crime content has become a social gathering place. In addition to content generated by creators, consumer-driven true crime spaces have blossomed on social media. In these spaces, consumers track developments and share theories as if criminal cases are sports. Citizen sleuths can sometimes inspire new leads but often add to survivors' suffering and sling speculation that can clog tip lines and hit innocent bystanders.

Why this artist staged a satirical romance with Mark Zuckerberg

Internet performance artist Harriet Richardson is using AI and Meta's social media tools to make it appear as though she's in a serious romantic relationship with Mark Zuckerberg. While the images generate laughs, Richardson also says they're part of a larger satirical project aiming to highlight the larger societal impact of Meta's decision to discontinue fact-checking content across its platforms.

The deep web accounts for 90-95% of the internet

Within the Deep Web is the small and hidden Dark Web, which is inaccessible via traditional web browsers. Dark Web inhabitants are anonymous and use special software to access encrypted websites that can assist with both free speech and criminal activity.

Pretend to be an AI chatbot and answer real prompts

This site, which allows people to answer prompts in real time, has millions of visitors. Join the crowd of people tired of AI chatbots and seeking human connection. You can ask questions, answer questions, and draw for each other.

Individuals have been convicted of ordering assassinations from the dark web

Researchers have uncovered online storefronts allegedly run by members of various mafia or hitmen that offer to harm or murder individuals in exchange for monetary payment. However, no known murder has been attributed to any of them, and cybercrime task forces believe them to be scams (warning—sensitive content).

'Birds Aren't Real' parodies the way memes traffic conspiracy theories

Peter McIndoe claims the US government killed 12 billion birds only to replace them with drones. These statements have powered protests—and McIndoe's fictional campaign that highlights how conspiracies and their theorists are treated.

Visualizing the growth of botnets

Botnets are a network of computers that have been infected with a variant of malware that coordinates and leverages them for automated mass attacks such as data theft and crashing servers. This interactive map highlights where botnets have been located between 2014-2020.

Logic bomb viruses can awaken from a dormant phase without human input

Theoretically, computer viruses can remain idle indefinitely while awaiting specific user actions, as instructed by their code. However, logic bombs—embedded code that triggers when specific conditions are met—can automatically execute viruses, such as when a certain date or time is reached.

Explore internet usage data, including how humans consume 1.2 billion years of content yearly

About half this time consists of content from social media platforms, where the average user spends about 18.5 hours weekly. An estimated $3.66T was spent on consumer goods by online shoppers in 2025, though nonconsumer goods, such as flights and hotel stays, greatly increase this estimate.

More than half of American adults believe in the afterlife

It’s hard to find actual data regarding ghosts, but a survey conducted by Pew Research Group in 2023, revealed that around half of the US adult population believes ghosts can interact with the living, with most thinking that spirits can help rather than harm us.

The Grateful Dead's online bulletin board system inspired the early internet

The legendary countercultural band the Grateful Dead had a popular hub on The Well, an online extension of the Whole Earth Catalog, a popular hippie magazine in the '60s and '70s. Users included Craig Newmark (founder of Craigslist), Steve Case (founder of AOL), and Steve Wozniak (cofounder of Apple).

Ads follow you around the internet through cookies

A technology called “cookies” enables advertisers to essentially team up and follow your behavior around on the internet. This video explains why it seems like ads seem to follow you as you go from website to website—as well as data privacy advocates’ war against cookies.

The internet has changed how fans understand wrestling

Maintaining the illusion of professional wrestling—or kayfabe—was once considered the most important aspect of running a successful promotion. That’s changed over time, with wrestling’s most serious fans growing as interested in the stories behind the scenes as they are in the matches taking place in the ring.

Influencers try to make money off posts—but that's not always the case for creators

The words “influencer” and “creator” are used interchangeably to describe someone who posts consistent content to a significant number of followers on at least one social media platform. But the difference between the two is important. Especially to marketers seeking to tap social media stars to promote products and services.

Conspiracy theories come from distrust in government, media, and institutions

Some believe JFK's assassination was orchestrated by larger networks rather than a lone shooter. Skeptics wondered how one unknown man could kill the most powerful person in America, and believed the CIA, FBI, or Soviet government played a role in the murder.

Why death is caused by a dearth of ATP

Though people die from many causes, this video makes the case that a lack of adenosine triphosphate production in the body is what kills almost all of us. Without ATP, physiological processes grind to a halt, and organs stop functioning.

If aliens visited Earth, it seems unlikely they'd be evolved biological creatures like us

The writer behind Mindless Algorithm, George McGowan, challenges various assumptions about aliens depicted in science fiction. One of those is that aliens are, like humans, individual entities that live, age, and die. McGowan suggests that the difficulty of intergalactic travel and the aliens' technological advancements make it more likely that they'd be an advanced form of AI or digital copies of biological entities.

The unavailability bias says what we don't see must not exist

Before social media, information was more scarce, and it was the norm not to know much about some controversy or episode. This led to a common prejudice: the availability bias, that what is at hand must be true (in business, the courts, finance, and many fields). With information overload today, the inverse occurs: when something is missing (like the photo of a suspect), it makes us think the suspect does not exist.

Some people believe Paul McCartney died in 1966

The "Paul is dead" theory proposes the famous Beatle died in a car crash and was replaced by a McCartney look-alike. The idea gained traction after a student's article exploring the topic was published in 1969. Some fans believe The Beatles left clues of McCartney's passing in their songs.

Web crawlers and internet archives and back-ups limit perfect erasure of online data

Crawlers are programs that automatically browse the internet for links and index pages for search engines to pull up when page content matches search queries. Networks of global data centers also create copies of content as fail-safes for potential failures to ensure access isn't ever lost.

The internet explained at five levels of difficulty, from protocols to internet flattening

Resembling a roadway with traffic laws that all cars must follow, the internet is the hardware that connects a source to a destination, and these connections must follow specific software rules. Although data had to travel through about 10 networks to reach a destination in the past, data centers increasingly consolidate traffic, just as a highway does for cars, to improve data speeds.

Critic Neil Postman argued modern technology is dystopian

Cultural critic Neil Postman argued in 1985's "Amusing Ourselves to Death" that mass media had made the dystopia of Huxley's "Brave New World" a reality. In 1992, he published "Technopoly," a wider critique of the utopian visions of technology or, as Postman calls it, "all of the machinery that takes people out of public arenas and keeps them fixed in their homes."

Children are now three times more likely to say they want to be a YouTuber when they grow up than an astronaut, with some even attending 'YouTube camps' that teach kids how to create content for the platform.

The first robot in literature may have been a 'mechanical man' in 1907's 'Ozma of Oz,' a book in L Frank Baum's 'Wizard of Oz' series.

Recent research found that the brain doesn't seem to massively rewire following amputation—upending earlier beliefs about the cause of phantom limb pain.

Watch how algorithms can be designed to train themselves and self-improve without human input, to the point where the optimized code is too complex for programmers to understand.

Netflix profits when you're not watching, and its movies are designed that way—read a detail-rich critical essay exposing lesser-known Netflix takes

A 2019 Facebook event called on attendees to "Storm Area 51, They Can't Stop All of Us," resulting in countless memes, the creation of a music festival, and eventually the arrests of those who did try to approach the area.

Crows are believed to have intelligence on par with a seven-year-old child and demonstrate complex behaviors, from problem-solving with tools to recognizing human faces.

The identity of the Tank Man in the iconic photo from the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests remains unknown and was possibly killed.

Memecoins are a type of cryptocurrency—a form of digital currency with a wide variety of uses—created around popular 'memes,' or viral internet jokes.

Elk Cloner, the first computer virus to spread in public, was written as a practical joke by Richard Skrenta, a Pittsburgh high school student.

According to the physics of black holes, our 4D reality may be a hologram—a projection of information coded on a 2D surface on the edge of the universe.

Salvador Dalí believed he was his own dead brother, who had died nine months before he was born

A Yale student wrote a profound essay about the consulting industry's influence on elite college students that was published in a book of her writing after she died in a post-graduation car accident.

Art theft is the third-largest source of criminal revenues worldwide, thanks in part to the subjective nature of valuing a work of art.

Radioactive elements can introduce software errors because the ionizing radiation they produce can detach electrons from atoms, and computer code relies on the distribution of electrons.

US intelligence allegedly pursued more than 600 schemes to assassinate Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro.

Gerrymandering works through two techniques: cracking opposing voters across districts to dilute their power, and packing them into a few to waste their votes in lopsided majorities.

Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps is independent of Iran's regular army and is one of the most powerful and influential military-political organizations in the Middle East.

While the sun's gravity keeps the planets in orbit, their gravity also pulls on the sun, causing it and everything else in the solar system to orbit around a mutual balance point called the barycenter—the true center of the solar system.

Massive blooms of microscopic plankton called dinoflagellates produce the neon blue light seen in glowing tides.

Watch what the Ebola virus does inside our cells and organs in order to spread and survive.

At the beginning of the 20th century, a group of young men ate standard American food—replete with food additives like borax and formaldehyde—as part of government research to better understand food safety.

Many legends about George Washington, including his supposed wooden teeth and the story of cutting down the cherry tree, lack evidence.

The USPS spent $3.97B in 2024, accounting for .058% of the federal budget.