Bots are killing social media, but decentralization can save it

Opinion by: Leroy Hofer, co-founder and CEO at Teneo Protocol

As the old wisdom goes, nobody knows you’re a dog on the internet. Often enough, nobody knows if you’re a bot either, to the point where the dead internet theory sometimes feels disturbingly tangible. 

Bot traffic share hit its highest level in 2024, up 2% on the year before, according to the 2024 Imperva Bad Bot Report. The bot pandemic is ravaging the Web. People are taking notice — people like Chanpeng Zhao, for example, who recently urged Elon Musk to ban bots on X. He’s not the only one in the Web3 community to call for such measures, and rightly so. 

From artificially inflating engagement metrics to orchestrating scams, bots are quickly drowning out real human interactions — and it’s at a time when our lives drift more and more into the online world. 

While platform owners continue to roll out AI-driven moderation and paywalls to curb bot activity, these solutions fail to address the root problem. Moderation tools also regularly operate with minimal transparency — incorrectly flagging legitimate content without users knowing why.

Users also often have to surrender personal data to prove they are not bots, raising privacy concerns and creating barriers to participation. More problems are being made, and a decentralized approach is the only viable path forward.

If left to fester, the rise of bots will create repercussions that go way beyond social media. Companies pouring money into digital marketing will see their budgets wasted on fake engagement. It’s even possible to imagine a dirty trick where a rival would use bots to waste the competitor’s money by feeding them fake impressions — this already happens in the digital ad space.

People are — and will continue to become — more suspicious of online interactions, making it harder for authentic creators and businesses to earn trust. The user experience also suffers. As automated noise drowns out meaningful discussions, users may eventually abandon social media for good. We need to deal with the bot problem for all these and other reasons — once and for good.

Social media giants have been using centralized moderation strategies to tackle the bots issue for quite some time. AI-driven detection systems serve as the first line of defense. They’re far from perfect. Bots are getting smarter, often slipping through the cracks by mimicking human behavior and bypassing safeguards. On top of that, false positives can lead to unfair restrictions on genuine users. Oh, the mighty banhammer, a weapon from a more civilized age. 

Recent: CZ urges Elon Musk to ban bots on the X social media platform

Another common tactic is the implementation of paywalls, like X’s verification fees, which require users to pay for authentication. This method raises the financial hurdle for bot operators but also creates a two-tiered system that disadvantages users who can’t — or won’t — pay. Paywalls do little to deter well-funded bot farms that can easily overlook these costs. While these measures are well-meaning, they often miss the mark when balancing security with user accessibility.

A decentralized model hands the reins back to the users and offers an alternative to having centralized entities decide what’s real and what’s not. Using blockchain-based decentralized identity (DID) and reputation systems, platforms can verify real users without compromising their privacy. Decentralized solutions reduce the need for unclear moderation policies and empower people to control their own digital reputations across different platforms.

DID solutions enable users to verify their authenticity through cryptographic attestations, so intrusive Know Your Customer processes are unnecessary. Reputation-based systems can help to strengthen bot resistance by rewarding verified users with more social credibility while shrinking the impact of suspicious accounts. The real advantage here is that these systems operate transparently, preventing centralized authorities from imposing rules that may prioritize corporate interests over user rights.

The bot problem isn’t just a hassle — it’s a fundamental threat to the integrity of social media. The challenge is finding a solution that gets rid of bots without getting rid of free speech and user control. Centralized solutions are failing. Even worse, centralized systems also introduce new problems under the guise of security. A decentralized, data-driven approach enables people to authenticate themselves on their own terms, making bot-driven manipulation much harder.

We urgently need to move beyond the current system and push for decentralized solutions that protect users and bring authenticity back to social media. If social media is to be a space for genuine human interaction, it has to go decentralized before the bots make it useless.

Opinion by: Leroy Hofer, co-founder and CEO at Teneo Protocol.

This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal or investment advice. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.