X: The dead body of the internet?

An X account called Historic Vids screwed up over the weekend and accidentally posted a video without any sound. This wouldn’t be that big of a problem except the whole “joke” of the video was the audio. In the actual video, it’s a Kazakhstani news anchor doing a tongue twister.

So you’d expect that Historic Vids’ video would have flopped without the audio. Except it didn’t. It has 30 million “views” and almost two thousand retweets. And the hundreds of replies beneath the video are all from other verified novelty accounts promoting their own content.

This has led to a bunch of people sharing the “dead internet” theory, which argues that majority of the web is actually just bots talking to each other. I don’t think that’s true for the whole web, but I am beginning to think that it is probably true for X.

/via Garbage Day