Manipulation is definitely occuring. A lot of it is marketing campaigns, but that's mostly benign. Some of it is actually harmful, such as the US government paying social media influencers and other famous people to encourage compliance with COVID mandates (e.g. Jimmy Kimel promoting the COVID vaccines, the dancing nurses, etc).

Concerning "bot activity", 100% of that is human-controlled. There are no programs producing new content [0]. All "bot activity" consists of accounts controlled by a single person, who uses his accounts to spam his content. But most bot activity is only effective at convincing very gullible people. The rest require actual human interaction [1].

FWIW, you can very easily avoid manipulation online. First, install an ad-blocker, such as uBlock Origin. Second, stop consuming mass media: social media, news, TV, radio, movies, magazines. There is some mass media that might be worth consuming, but 90% of it is either garbage or manipulative. But finding that 10% is very time-consuming.

[0] = AIs like ChatGPT do not generate new content. They mix up and regurgitate content that they found on the Internet.

[1] = Broke college students and mommy bloggers will happily promote your dumb product or tyrannical policies.

Yes, as per the theory the internet is 'dying' by parastical bot infestation. ChatGPT/AI has made the matter worse because now even during interactions when there is actually a human on the other end you can no longer assume they are not generating responses or new content with the help of said bot.

That said, I think we are still early. Grassroots projects like SN and other alt media make it more difficult for bot farms (whether militarized or corporate or just spammers) to fly under the radar. In fact, we've got a great v4v feature built in that is mitigating that to some extent with the zaps.

So it's like anything; nothing can stay still without dying - it's up to us to keep adapting the tech and improving our communication procedures to retain open discourse. Even if gasp that involves resolving to have more IRL discussions.

I think it is the case to an extent, there's a reason people have so much group think because they're not really using the internet they're using a walled garden like google or a social media app that can craft narratives for you

Even the blogs that rank on search engines like bing and google could be curated or bot written or just punish users who have different opinions by deranking them, Comments on blogs can also be bottted and give people the illusion of consensus

ChatGPT also makes me feel like they had this tech running in the background for some time, feeding bot accounts bet that on social media or building content. Now that we've opened it up to the public, so many people are using ChatGPT and BARD without questioning it and they are promoting narratives as if these bots are impartial

I also think it there are human bot farms I can see that on review sites people are paid to push certain opinions, so why wouldn't that be done on other topics or use cases? The general internet experience that normies have are all crafted because people arent willing to explore

No

Relative to real activity, I think it's reasonable to assume bot activity is much greater. This seems mostly to be a sensational misnomer. If I have a raging bacterial infection whose biological mass outnumbers my own and yet the bacteria is dependent on me living, I am not dead. I am alive but precariously.

Definitely possible. Bot activity used by private companies and governments/militaries for the purposes of nudging/shaping public opinions and thus controlling the narrative is very real and probably far more advanced than we realise. 5th generational warfare is largely psychological and unrestricted in nature so it makes perfect sense to take hold of the internet (the globally connected mind) and use fake accounts/dead internet as a tool of control