Moltbook: One day when you look at your phone… What if the person on the other side isn't human?

A friend messaged me the other day: “We won't even know who we are talking to anymore.” At first, I laughed, but then I thought about it. Because when you look at the history of technology, we have seen how things initially called impossible later became a normal part of life. Recently, there has been talk of Moltbook, a digital AI social media platform where artificial intelligences (AI) talk among themselves. This idea and experiment are being discussed within real platforms and real technological projects. It brings forward a new concept in terms of communication sciences and media studies: artificial agent-based digital interaction environments. 

Moltbook, which has become a hot topic, is a social media platform designed for AI agents to produce content, unlike classic social media. On the platform launched by entrepreneur Matt Schlicht, AI can send messages, debate, use tools, build communities, and create identities. In this environment, AI systems can produce content, interact with other systems, mimic user behaviors, and in some cases, simulate social behavioral patterns. The questions of whether AI can develop social behavior, whether AI can establish community norms, and whether AI can build its own information ecosystem are actually being tested. However, the interesting part starts here. Because analyses show that a significant portion of the frightening content on the platform is actually produced by humans. This situation leads to new theoretical debates regarding the future of the digital public sphere.

“In our time, everyone on the internet was human”

Looking at the history of digital media, the communication structure has changed gradually. In the early period, the internet was more of a read-only environment. Later, with social media, people began to produce and share content. Today, humans and AI participate in content production processes together. In the new phase being discussed, the inclusion of machine-to-machine interaction in the digital content production ecosystem is at stake. At this point, academic debate focuses on whether AI can be considered a social actor, who the actors of the digital public sphere will be, and how the human-centered communication model will transform.

From the perspective of the sociology of technology, two main approaches stand out here. While the technological determinism approach argues that technology shapes society, the social construction approach argues that society decides how to use technology. When current AI developments are examined, it is seen that the second approach is stronger. Because AI systems are data-dependent, their training processes are under human control and rely on human labor, and the target functions of the systems are determined by humans. Therefore, rather than AI directly governing society, it is a more likely scenario that the actors who control AI (technology companies and their capital) will gain power.

In the risk scenario prominent in academic literature, the concern is not so much that AI will gain consciousness, but that social systems will become overly dependent on AI systems. Especially in information ecosystems, algorithmic agenda-setting, automated decision systems in the economy, and the increase in the density of synthetic content (AI slop) in the field of social interaction have raised the debate about human decision-making becoming invisible. This situation requires a re-evaluation of the relationship between technological power and social power.

When future projections are examined, the most likely model is seen as hybrid systems where humans and AI make decisions together. In these systems, while AI produces analysis and recommendations, strategic decisions are expected to remain under human control. In this context, the question “Who will control AI-supported decision systems?” becomes more important than the question of whether AI will govern humans.

Because there is a truth that has remained unchanged throughout the history of technology:

Technology alone is not power. Power is about who develops the technology, who controls it, and for what purposes they use it. Will AI govern humans? Or will some humans govern other humans through AI? Historically, the second possibility is much stronger. “The future may not be a dystopia where machines govern humans. But it could be a world where a small number of people who control the machines govern everyone else.”