$1m boost for bot farm shows how AI startups are outpacing regulators

Doublespeed floods the internet with fake accounts posing as humans, but this didn’t deter one of the world’s biggest venture capital firms.

- By Niamh Rowe

Doublespeed's founders don't speak like most startup executives. In a video on X, the 21-year-old cofounder, Zuhair Lakhani, boasts that his business is “killing the internet”, a nod to the “dead internet theory” that claims much activity online is now artificial, created by bots.

Behind him are racks of smartphones wired into charging hubs, a setup known as a bot farm, where real phones are automated to run fake social media personas, making them harder for platforms to detect than conventional bots.

Bot farms have been operating underground for more than a decade, hired to boost a person or company’s social media presence by selling “likes”, views and followers. They broke into the public consciousness in 2016, when Russia's Internet Research Agency ran an extensive social media influence operation around the US election. Facebook later estimated its content may have reached as many as 126 million Americans.

Tech companies prohibit covert influence operations, leaving bot farms to operate in the shadows, mostly based in Asia.