According to this source, the dead internet theory holds that most of social media, or a large portion of it, is run by bots. Social media organizations may either use these bots to make their sites more addictive to expose people to more ads and make more money, or they may use these bots to heavily influence people's views by what they are consuming on their feeds or what they see "most people" are agreeing with. A third alternative is that these bots are made by third parties who may be trying to push their own agendas/ scams. Whatever the motive is behind making these bots, dead internet theory says that most of the interactions you have or media you see is heavily influenced by bots.

I think social media platforms allow bots to operate for a couple of reasons. First, bots are useful for informing people of information that can be automated, like the news, weather, warnings, etc. Bots are also useful to social media companies so that they can inflate their numbers; bots can make it look like more people are active at any one point and make a social media platform look more successful. The last reason social media companies might allow bots is that enforcing the bots would cost them a lot of money, so allowing them and only moderating the extreme usage of bots would save the companies loads of money.

I think of the relationship between social media and "real life" as social media being a part of real life. Social media is so integrated into our lives that I think recently it has become a part of real life. We all carry phones in our pockets and computers in our backpacks, there isn't really a distinction between being online and offline anymore, I would argue that for the most part we are all online. We check our phones for notifications every couple minutes and sometimes we even have notifications being relayed to us through our headphones when we aren't looking at a screen. The way we receive and send information is for the most part through social media and this has become the new norm. Humans are social creatures, we need connection, attention, and community, and nowadays we are fed all of these things through social media, for that reason I think there is no difference between social media and real life.

Kantianism is my favorite ethical lens because of the infinite number of hypothetical situations it creates for us to analyze. For example, say you come across a problem on whether you should lie or tell the truth in a certain situation. Well Kantianism might prompt you to ask yourself the question "What would life look like if everyone lied?" You would probably come to the conclusion that society would collapse because nobody would be able to trust one another. This would prompt you to then question "What would life look like if everyone told the truth?" and you might discover that these two hypothetical realities look quite similar. From here you would have to ask the more specific question "What would life look like if everyone in my certain situation lied?". This is why I love Kantian ethics, there is an unlimited amount of pondering to be done and hypotheticals to be worked out. I find it fascinating to work out these hypotheticals and see how much the answer depends on how the question is framed.