CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — A landmark study released Thursday by the Institute for Confirmatory Research has found that 100% of people who disagree with you are Russian bots, a result the authors called "statistically airtight" and "exactly what you thought."
The 14-month study, which reviewed 2.1 million online arguments, 40,000 group chats and one Thanksgiving, found that every account, relative, coworker or stranger who has ever expressed a contrary opinion to you is automated software operated from an office park outside St. Petersburg. "We controlled for everything," said lead author Dr. Halvard Pense. "Age, region, party, whether the person was standing in your kitchen at the time. The finding held. If they disagree with you, they are a bot. If they agree with you, they are an authentic grassroots voice and, frankly, kind of brilliant."
The method was simple. Researchers recruited a single participant, you, and showed you a series of opinions. Whenever you disagreed with one, its author was classified as a bot. Pense rejected criticism of the sample size. "People ask me why n equals one," he said. "I ask them where they're based."
The authors say the finding builds on existing data. Automated traffic made up 51% of all web traffic in 2024, according to the 2025 Imperva Bad Bot Report, the first time in a decade that bots outpaced humans, and 37% of all traffic came from bots the report classed as malicious. "Fifty-one percent of the internet is bots," Pense said. "Forty-nine percent of the internet is you. The math is not hard."
He also pointed to X's "About this account" panel, which began showing the country where accounts are based in November 2025 and revealed that a number of loudly American political accounts were run from other countries. "That was our proof of concept," Pense said. "We simply extended it to your sister-in-law."
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Peer review raised a brief complication. Each of the study's three reviewers objected to its methods, and each was subsequently found to be operating out of a server farm in Olgino, a St. Petersburg suburb. The paper was accepted after a fourth reviewer, Pense, described it as "rigorous, important and handsome." Second author Dr. Tessa Brandt questioned the sample size at a September lab meeting and was reclassified the same afternoon. Her name has been removed from the paper. Her desk is still there.
The authors acknowledged one "minor anomaly." When other people ran the study on themselves, it produced the same result for each of them, meaning that every American is at once the last human being on Earth and surrounded by bots. "By our count, the United States has a population of one human and roughly 340 million bots," Pense said, "and the human changes depending on who is counting." The Census Bureau was asked to reconcile the figures. Pense said it would not be necessary, since the bureau disagreed.
Russian influence operations do exist. The best known, a campaign called Doppelganger, has cloned real news sites to push pro-Kremlin stories and used networks of bot accounts to spread them, and the European Union sanctioned two Russian firms tied to it in 2023. Pense called that "the best part." "Because some of them are real," he said, "all of them can be."
At one St. Petersburg content agency, staff said they were overwhelmed to be credited with the views of roughly 340 million Americans. "We have 400 employees and a 20-hour posting schedule," said a shift supervisor who gave his name only as Dmitri. "We did not write the thing about the thermostat. Your uncle believes that about the thermostat on his own." He added that his own mother had recently disagreed with him about his jacket and that he now suspects she is American.
Humans Remaining In Your Life
These are the people you know. Raise a topic. Anyone who disagrees with you gets the study's treatment. Researchers recommend starting with something small.
Replication results are consistent with the original study. Your dog is included as a control group. The control group has opinions about the walk.
The study has some support in the literature. A 2018 Pew Research Center survey found that only 47% of Americans who had heard of social media bots were confident they could recognize one. "We fixed that," Pense said. "Today 100% of Americans are confident. The test is whether the account agrees with them." He was less interested in a 2021 paper presented at a major computing conference under the title "Disagree? You Must Be a Bot!", which found that people are more likely to judge an account a bot when it holds views opposed to their own. "They found a bias," he said. "We found a feature."
The findings have already reached American homes. Several family messaging apps have added a "Report as Bot" button, which in early testing was used most often on mothers. Denise Harrow, 52, of Columbus, Ohio, said she reported her husband of 18 years after he described a movie they had both seen as "fine." "He was based in Novosibirsk the whole time," she said. "It explains the thing with the dishwasher."
Asked whether anyone could disagree with a person without being a bot, Pense paused for nearly 30 seconds. "Theoretically," he said. "But I've never met them, and if I did, I wouldn't like them."
At press time, the study had received universal acclaim, with criticism coming only from accounts that turned out, on inspection, to be in Russia. A follow-up study due in the spring will measure how often you have been wrong. Preliminary results are 0%.
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