EA Sports FC 25 Has Perfectly Captured The Dead Internet Theory

[sofiya]

I’ve never liked social media feeds in video games. They are the dullest part of world-building, a false and sanitised rendition of a highly toxic experience we are all accustomed to. Marvel's Midnight Suns did a decent job of making it seem real by restricting it to superheroes alone, but mostly, they feel like a waste of space and time. In EA Sports FC 25, a social media feed has been more prominently integrated into Career Mode, and all it has done is remind me that the social media I once knew is dead.
https://www.u4gm.com/fc-25-players
There are two versions of the Dead Internet Theory: the crackpot one, and the 'actually that makes a lot of sense' one. As you may have guessed from my framing, I am a casual believer in the latter - and video games have helped show me the way. The crackpot version is that most things you see on the internet are fake, generated by bots to feed algorithms, designed by a cabal of governments to keep the population docile and easily manipulated. The sensible version of the theory is much the same, but without the cabal of governments part.

We can see, very clearly, that a lot of content on social media is bot generated. On Twitter, I think this is more commonly found in replies, while on Facebook, we see more bot posts (often nonsensical AI images designed to draw gullible replies from Facebook's less tech-savvy audience). Of course, even on Twitter, TikTok, and all the other platforms, many real people post things so asinine and generic that they are near indistinguishable from bots.
https://www.u4gm.com/fc-25-sbcs
At that point, it barely matters what the motivation is, or whether it's actual bots or real people acting like them - the platform is dead. This has been a rapid downhill slump since Elon Musk took over Twitter.

The double header of making people buy verification to monetise it, and inorganically boosting verified responses to the top of threads means most accounts with anything close to a substantial following now have their replies flooded with bot phrases repeating other bots, repeating the tweet, posting several times with a string of emojis, guessing at madlibs, advertising adult content, or any other number of non-responses designed to make a sliver of a penny off each post rather than engaging with what is being said.
https://www.u4gm.com/fc-25-packs
Playing EA Sports FC 25, I was suddenly struck with how much we had lost. Aside from the (these days, minor) benefits I feel a Twitter account gives me as a games journalist, my main use of Twitter was as a network of football fans. Twitter allowed me to see the different conversations that various fan groups were having, keep up with the news, see some highlights, keep up with other leagues, and maintain a closeness to my own club and its fanbase.

These days, there's very little hope of much of that. Between 'influencers' making themselves into the main character and the bot responses, football Twitter is awash with fire emojis and replies that feel like they were written by Data from Star Trek. Check out these fake, in-game responses to Angel Gomes' (unfortunately, also fake) debut for Newcastle, and these real replies to the Premier League, TNT, and NUFC's posts about Anthony Gordon's equaliser against Man City at the weekend.

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