The $ 114 billion scam: the Internet collapses under the Bots – could the gaming be the solution?

In 2025, a large part of what we see online is artificial. Subscribers, likes, views, comments … little is really human. According to Juniper Researchmore than $ 114 billion will be lost this year because of fraudulent commitment. BOTS and agents doped at AI now represent more than half of world web traffic. They imitate human behavior on Tiktok, Reddit, YouTube and X.

Commitment, long considered as the central internet currency, is collapsing under the weight of automated manipulation.

A web -scale credibility crisis

In the fourth quarter of 2024, Tiktok deleted 185 million false accounts. Facebook has erased more than a billion. A study of Internet 2.0 estimates that more than 60% of X users could be bots.

Comments generated by AI, false customer reviews, deepfakes, synthetic influencers … Timelines are saturated.

And users drop out. According to a report by Cmswire,, 81% of Internet users no longer trust social content. More than half are unaware of influencer publications. Meanwhile, some SMEs waste until 30% of their advertising budget in dummy traffic (Tap).

“” It's not just a matter of lost budget Summarizes a marketing analyst who requested anonymity. “” The whole structure of visibility and legitimacy on the Internet collapses. »»

AI has accelerated the phenomenon

The rise of advanced language models has amplified the problem. In 2025, Claude d'Anthropic Was used to generate a coordinated network of false profiles on Facebook and X, interacting with tens of thousands of users in what researchers qualified as ” manipulation as a service. »»

Reddit Recently banished university researchers who have deployed bots with distinct human personalities, one of whom was pretended to be a trauma advisor, accumulating more than 10,000 Karma points in a few months. Most users did not realize that they were interacting with an AI.

These incidents are not isolated. A 2025 report of theInstitute for Strategic Dialogue revealed that automated bots were responsible for almost all of the sharing of certain political videos faked in Germany. The platforms, submerged by volume and complexity, are struggling to react in real time.

Gaming becomes a field of experimentation

While most of the internet is fighting to rebuild trust, the video game sector emerges as one of the few to progress significantly. Unlike social or content platforms, games are autonomous systems with clear rules, measurable entries and concrete results. This structure facilitates the identification of fraud and the defense of integrity.

Game developers use all the tools available to them. Anti-trickered tools at the nucleus, such as the Vanguard de Riot, to community moderation on Discord and Reddit, the industry deals with authenticity as an existential issue. Studios are now investing in real -time behavioral analysis, the transparency of scores and reputation mechanisms to distinguish real players from bots.

This change is both technical and cultural. Players demand a fair game. Cheat, use of bots and manipulation destroy the issue. This makes games a fertile field for innovation in verification.

An experimental approach

Among the new entrants, Coliseuma native web3 tournament platform already has more than three million community members, with more than 30,000 participants in its beta version. Coliseum attempts to integrate the verification directly into the competition layer. Rather than relying on customer -side analyzes or detections, it uses a system called Guardian Network, a network of human validators and logic in the protocol which confirms the results and the participants.

Players build their reputation thanks to verified games. Validators are encouraged to detect manipulation. Only the actions verified are rewarded, and the portfolios accumulate credibility difficult to falsify.

What we observe is not only advertising fraud or hyper-booted views or commitments, is the computational collapse of digital confidence.

Josh Gier, Coliseum marketing director

“” The AI ​​transformed the commitment to a weapon, making each 'like' and 'seen' suspect. Our approach is not to improve detection, but to make a paradigm shift towards an economy of the 'proof'. We are exploiting the game theory and the distributed validation made possible thanks to the blockchain technology to make the human interaction verified the most precious asset, thus creating a model for the next era of digital advertising and communities. »»

It's still early, but the idea is clear: commitment needs infrastructure, not moderation. Coliseum bets that when the false costs more than the true, the truth prevails.

The fight for digital trust

Regulators become aware of the problem. There American FTC has prohibited the sale of false subscribers and commitments. Europe is raging against biometric identification systems due to concerns about confidentiality. Platforms remove millions of false accounts each month, often without lasting effect.

But the application of the rules will always be late on innovation. The solution will not come from the hunt for boots, but from the construction of systems which reward proof. Gaming may not repair the internet. But this may be where the repair will start.