Visit any social media, and you’ll find pretty fast that the most common type of user is not a human. Spam accounts amounted to over 2.2 billion in 2018 on Facebook, and numbers have oscilated, according to Statista. But isn’t that a little concerning?

The world population is 8.3 billion people in recent numbers. Maybe it’s not “the most common type”, but it’s actually a quarter of the entire planet, with multiple factors to consider, of course. The fact that this is just one social network; that this happens on every platform; that tech companies can’t curb it; that criminal activity happens in those gaps between identity exploring and bad intent: it seems like we need to revisit a few concepts.

But you might have heard debates on AI being really good on identifying potential threats to the digital ecossystem. And sure, that enters territories that will make people feel a certain way. Including people from different generations.

The question of exploring identity has been explored by Danah Boyd on her book “It’s complicated: the social lives of networked teens”. With many interviews, she concluded that topics such as privacy were seen with many nuances that the less acquainted with newer technologies might not perceive in the same way, and complex dynamics with the real and virtual worlds affecting personhood and wellbeing came to the fore — with a more recent influx of the debates about safety, especially for women.

But then, AI made things difficult for men, admitedly.

It’s been a long standing business to offer shows of ladies on camera for paying viewers, but conditions are very often too precarious to even consider visiting those places, which you’d think that further stigmatizes the cam models, but internet culture made the sex positive movement place countless women in showbusiness without even the skill of speaking the language the world agreed to use for business — English.

As time passed, camera quality noticeably got better and better, even on the smartphone level. While it’s true that the best devices might not be affordable for the poor population of an underdeveloped country — not to mention the number of robberies –, the freedom to access livestream changed something deep in the perception of reality of many, as well as intimacy, sex and even music taste.

But the danger is to trigger paranoia: if a quarter are fake users on the internet, then what’s happening in those places that offer “free chat with hot girls”? If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is — but that might mean that you’re not gonna be friends with them, much less date them or even get to have real sex. And that’s what we need to understand.

Enough thinking that any pretty girl on the internet is AI. The relationship of this with Public Health is something a lot of people refuse to see, given how judgmental they are towards anyone who prioritizes the virtual against the real (as if these were completely separate realms), but it’s easy to be paranoid as well as it’s necessary to label AI content — something that pretty much all AI companies refuse to do, for profit.

The specific niche of livestream is tough. If we’re raising kids that want to appear on camera for the entire world, then we have to wonder how come nobody has invoked sexuality and the web from a historical perspective, explaining the evolution of the media, and drawing from photography and film.

Instead, everyone’s comfortable with the machine making content creators — sometimes, literally. But along with deals we have no idea about how they were made in Hollywood and entertainment in general, we have more people who would rather stay with a meme instead of a debate: “absolute cinema”.