In Q3 2024 alone, Meta removed 1.1 billion fake accounts from its platforms. Read that number again. One point one billion. That’s more than the entire population of Africa — gone in a single quarter. And that’s just the accounts they caught.

Welcome to the bot epidemic.

The Scale of the Problem

Fake accounts aren’t a minor inconvenience. They’re a structural failure baked into the foundations of how the modern internet was built. Social platforms were designed to grow fast — and they did. But in that race to accumulate users, identity verification was never part of the conversation.

The result is a sprawling ecosystem of bots, fake profiles and anonymous bad actors that has quietly poisoned how information flows online.

Think about what that actually means in practice. 72% of online abuse comes from anonymous accounts. Fake profiles are routinely used to manufacture consensus, push misinformation and manipulate public opinion at scale. Advertisers are collectively spending billions targeting audiences that don’t exist. Journalists are sourcing quotes and eyewitness accounts from profiles that were never real people to begin with.

And the platforms know. They’ve always known. Fake engagement inflates their metrics. It props up ad revenue. It makes user numbers look impressive when earnings season rolls around.

Authenticity was never their priority. Engagement was.

AI Is About to Make This Exponentially Worse

If 1.1 billion fake accounts sounds alarming, what’s coming next is something else entirely.

Artificial intelligence can now produce convincing articles, realistic images, deepfake video and fully scripted social media conversations — quickly, cheaply and at enormous scale. We’re moving towards a world where synthetic content becomes the norm rather than the exception, and the line between what’s real and what’s generated quietly disappears.

Fake accounts used to need human operators behind them. Now a single bad actor can run thousands of AI-powered personas, each one producing original content, engaging with real users and nudging narratives — without a single real person involved.

The window to get ahead of this is open. But it won’t stay open indefinitely.

Why the Big Platforms Won’t Fix This

At this point it’s fair to ask — why don’t Facebook, X or Instagram just verify their users?

The answer is straightforward, even if it’s uncomfortable. It’s not in their interest.

Social platforms are built around engagement. Their entire commercial model depends on maximising time spent on platform, and bots — ironically — are quite good at driving engagement. Fake likes, inflated comment sections and algorithmic amplification all serve the same purpose underneath it all.

More engagement means more advertising revenue. Verification would shrink user numbers, complicate the metrics they sell to advertisers and threaten the model their valuations are built on.

The big platforms aren’t going to solve the trust crisis. In many ways, they are the trust crisis.

Verification Is the Only Real Answer

The solution itself isn’t complicated. It just requires someone to actually build it.

The underlying principle already exists in other critical systems. Banks verify customers before allowing transactions. Governments verify identity before issuing documents. Professional bodies check credentials before granting licences.

The same logic belongs in the information ecosystem. If every person publishing content online is a verified human being, and every piece of content carries authenticated provenance data, the bot epidemic loses most of its power overnight. Bad actors lose their anonymity. Fake communities can’t be assembled from nothing. Misinformation becomes traceable back to its source.

Verification doesn’t just reduce harm. It creates trust. And in an information economy, trust is the thing everything else is built on.

The Credibility Layer the Internet Has Been Missing

This is what Media.com is here to do.

We’re building a verified media network where every contributor is authenticated using banking-grade identity technology, and every piece of content carries provenance data through C2PA Content Credential standards. Not as a feature. Not as a compliance exercise. As the foundation.

The internet scaled information successfully. What it never built was a system for credibility.

The 1.1 billion fake accounts removed in a single quarter aren’t the conclusion of this story. They’re an early warning. The bot epidemic is growing, AI is accelerating it, and the platforms with the most to lose have every reason to look the other way.

Someone needs to build the trust infrastructure the world is asking for.

We think it should exist. And we’re building it.

Media.com is a verified media network dedicated to rebuilding trust online. Join the waitlist at media.com.

Must it be this way? Where did we go wrong? How do we fix it?

These are the questions we ask as we roll out Media.com, frame by frame, feature by feature. Our fundamental thrust being that ignorance of a given technological force causes trepidation and the sense that the force controls us. We’re here to provide a better way than social media has provided so far — not only to connect with each other, tell stories and keep informed, but also to quench the thirst so many of us have for reliability, accountability and transparency in the content we consume.

We consider this to be a glaring void the internet’s many pioneers overlooked in their great race to connect billions of nodes to each other – real or not, identifiable or anonymous – as they sought eyeballs or at least potential eyeballs, at almost any cost.

Perhaps initial generations of social media failed in this regard. Disorder was the rule. Connection was the pitch. Engagement was the measure. Advertising revenue was the bottom line. Comprehension came later.

We the innocent consumers saw the shiny new thing and hopped in. We drove and drove until the thing broke down, in the middle of nowhere, with ominous clouds approaching. And here we are: anxious. Unable to fix the thing because, yes, it turns out selfies and untraceable incendiary comments don’t fix much. We’ve gone a little cybersick in the process, within a media metaverse that lacks the coherence to calm itself down.

We aim to learn from and repair the era that brought us here. We seek to rediscover optimism about how the internet and social media might enhance, but not dictate, our personal and business lives. Doing so requires full comprehension and discussion of social media’s effects and mechanics.

Simple. Coherent. Authentic. Trustworthy. Mature. Anxiety-free.

These are some of our guideposts. This is where a new way to think about “social media all grown up” begins — with intention.

Certainly a more mindful internet is possible, following in the tradition of a medium built to find improvements from within, as media and tech build atop each other, new version after new version. That’s our position — for the record. We can do this.

The first challenge: verification

Generations raised on smartphones and online networks seem to grasp these pitfalls more candidly than most. Internet ethnographer Katherine Dee describes the current era as shaped by “an internet-native sadism” where depression, nihilism and sleeping with one’s phone is a common experience for many under 40.

Indeed, millions now bear battle scars from a system that was perhaps never built to manage the forces of online exploitation. We often blame smartphones, but a smartphone is just hardware — a portal to the internet, wired by media in all its forms. We’re addicted to the content, not the device. A television is only as powerful as the shows and content it broadcasts; otherwise, it’s just an inert plastic box. A phone is the same.

In developing our vision for a next-generation social media platform, we prioritized verified identity. We examined how open systems can be exploited and concluded that anonymity — and the bots that feed on it — had to go.

We also implemented an age threshold (18) and built trust and safety into the foundation of our platform. Our Trust Center is at the core of this effort, ensuring oversight on issues such as: dangerous organizations, adult sexual abuse, hate speech, misinformation, copyright laws and high-risk users. See our Trust Center for more details.

Verification is our first step toward a trusted online universe. Many online seem to think anonymity is a fundamental reason to be online; we don’t question that this is attractive. Anonymity has its place, especially for those caught in oppressive societies and situations. But that’s not us. We are the first major social media community to validate each and every user. We understand the need for a safe anonymous space for some, but the other guys have that covered.

For individuals, a valid government-issued photo ID (a passport or driver’s license) is required. For a business profile, we verify an authorized officer before pursuing additional documentation under “Know Your Customer” and “Know Your Business” standards.

This means every piece of content on Media.com has a traceable source. We believe candid conversations and provocative content can coexist with this model. We believe internet commerce and social engagement online function better when humans — not bots — are in control. And we insist that a town square isn’t a town square if it’s full of cardboard cutouts with fake names pretending to be human. After all, isn’t that what computer games are for?

This is real social media, built on trust, safety, opportunity and imagination. A space where fragmented apps, paranoia about online interactions, and distrust dissolve into a sustainable joie de internet — a love of the internet. Yes, we believe it’s possible.

A higher-quality engagement

Susannah Page-Katz, our lead on content moderation, previously served as director of trust and safety at Kickstarter, where she drafted its AI guardrail policy. Crucially, this policy didn’t take a black-and-white stance on AI content creation; instead, it acknowledged AI as a media tool while ensuring creators remained transparent about its use.

The idea was to exercise control over a whiz-bang technology, while implementing a flexible approach that respects a creator’s inherent freedom to create as well as protect work from those that would steal or plagiarize. To control bot software, not bow to its supremacy. The internet is full of short cuts, safe to say — to fame, knowledge, art, journalism, wealth, etc. Page-Katz has been working on many forthcoming tools that address fact-checking and identity.

The trend is moving in this direction. A 2023 YouGov survey of 1,000 adults, cited by Bloomberg Law, found that 62% of respondents believe platforms should require real names and identity verification. Europe leads with tough policies Media.com follows, and several American states have enacted laws to “prohibit impersonation for purposes of harassment, intimidation, threat or deception to facilitate contact.”

Freedom of speech being a respected pillar within our approach, within reason. Does an anonymous burner-bot have the right to say whatever it wants? Not really. Not in our space. We’d have to point out that such entities don’t really “speak” at all. They mimic speech; they fake it. And that is not a protected right, last time we checked.

“These laws aren’t an attempt to limit what anyone can say,” wrote Bruce Heiman, a partner at the law firm K&L Gates, for Bloomberg. “They aim to prevent false identification.”

Page-Katz echoed Heiman. “We’re verifying the individuals behind the account, not the information they might share,” she said. “That’s the safety piece.”

Christy Grace Provines, our global head of brand, encourages new visitors to explore the Trust Center to gain a comprehensive understanding of our approach. Having led high-profile campaigns like Tinder’s 2023 global rebrand, Provines emphasizes that every feature we introduce is designed to “do less harm” and “be less toxic.”

“Our Trust Center outlines our reason to exist,” she said. “And verification matters because there are no bots on the platform. That’s our aim.”

We’re building a platform where engagement is higher quality, with fewer trolls, less spam and reduced toxicity. Hate speech, doxing and threats will trigger oversight. The goal is to create a digital space where accountability, trust and meaningful interactions thrive.

Bit by bit, we’re on a mission to redefine social media. We’ve identified the void and have set about filling it. We’ve established a safe online space and we invite you to be a part of it. We hope you’ll join us for our mission.

Before journalists could verify the facts, before editors could weigh the sourcing, before any traditional gatekeeping process could kick in — the story was already everywhere. Shared, reshared, screenshot, reposted. By the time corrections emerged, most people had already moved on.

This is the information environment we’re living in. And for journalists, it presents a problem that’s getting harder to ignore.

Trust in Media Is Collapsing — And the Numbers Show It

Audiences aren’t just sceptical of individual stories anymore. They’re sceptical of entire institutions. Trust in mainstream media has been declining steadily for years across most Western democracies, and the rise of social media hasn’t helped — if anything it’s accelerated the erosion by flooding the information space with content that carries no accountability whatsoever.

The irony is that more information is available now than at any other point in human history. The problem was never access. It was always credibility.

When anyone can publish anything under any name, and when the platforms distributing that content have no meaningful interest in verifying whether it’s true or who wrote it, the entire ecosystem tilts towards noise. Readers feel it. Journalists feel it. And the knock-on effects for public decision making — in elections, in health crises, in financial markets — are becoming harder to dismiss.

AI Has Changed the Stakes Completely

For most of the internet’s history, misinformation was largely a human problem. Someone chose to write something false. Someone chose to share it. The solution, in theory, was human too — better media literacy, stronger editorial standards, more responsible platform policies.

AI has quietly made that framing obsolete.

Synthetic articles, generated images, deepfake video, fabricated quotes attributed to real public figures — all of it can now be produced in seconds at virtually no cost. The technical barrier between wanting to create disinformation and actually doing it has effectively disappeared.

What this means for journalists is significant. The sourcing challenge that already existed — how do you verify an eyewitness account from someone you’ve never met? — has become considerably more complex when that eyewitness account might have been generated entirely by a machine.

The old tools aren’t sufficient anymore. Something structural needs to change.

The Missing Piece Is Provenance

When a photograph is taken on a modern camera, metadata is embedded into the file — the time, the location, the device used. That information doesn’t make the image impossible to manipulate, but it creates an evidence trail. It introduces accountability into a process that would otherwise have none.

Content provenance works on the same principle, applied to everything published online.

The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity — known as C2PA — has developed an open standard that allows a digital credential to be embedded into any piece of content at the point of creation. That credential travels with the content wherever it goes, recording who created it, when, and on what platform. It doesn’t tell you whether something is true. But it tells you where it came from, and it makes that origin verifiable.

For journalists, this is significant. Imagine being able to look at a video surfacing on social media and immediately see that it was captured by a verified individual in a specific location at a specific time — rather than having to spend hours trying to establish whether the source is legitimate.

That’s not a distant hypothetical. That’s what content provenance infrastructure makes possible.

Why This Matters Beyond the Newsroom

It would be easy to frame this as a problem that belongs exclusively to professional media. It isn’t.

The collapse of trust in information affects everyone. It shapes how people vote, what health decisions they make, whether they trust institutions, how they understand the world around them. When the information environment is polluted, the effects ripple outward into every corner of society.

Rebuilding that trust isn’t just a technical challenge — though the technical infrastructure matters enormously. It’s a cultural one too. People need to feel that when they read something, there’s a real human being accountable for it. That the content hasn’t been fabricated or manipulated. That the source is who they say they are.

Verification creates that foundation. Without it, credibility will keep eroding regardless of how good the journalism is.

What a Verified Information Ecosystem Actually Looks Like

Media.com is building the infrastructure that makes this possible.

Every contributor on the platform is verified as a real person or authenticated organisation using banking-grade identity technology. Every piece of content published carries C2PA Content Credentials — provenance data embedded at the point of creation that travels with the content wherever it’s distributed.

The result is a media network where trusted content can be created, published and shared with a level of accountability that simply doesn’t exist anywhere else online right now. For journalists, it means a trusted pool of verified sources. For audiences, it means content they can actually interrogate. For the broader information ecosystem, it means a foundation that credibility can be rebuilt on.

The internet worked out how to scale information a long time ago. What it never built was a system to scale trust alongside it.

That’s what we’re here to change.

Media.com is a verified media network dedicated to rebuilding trust online.