Surfshark
Watch the experience
What if half the internet conversations you read weren’t actually written by people? That’s the question explored by “Bot or Not?” — an interactive installation created by eight Malmö University students that helped inspire our new Cybersecurity Advocacy Fund initiative.
Presented during Milan Design Week 2026 as part of UNFOLD, the project invited visitors to step into a game experience where distinguishing between humans and bots turned out to be far harder than expected.
From students’ research to real-world experience
The project started with one alarming insight: bots are rapidly taking over online spaces. According to Surfshark’s fake accounts on social media research, the scale of fake online activity is staggering:
- Major social platforms remove 6.3 billion fake accounts annually;
- Facebook removes fake accounts at a volume 1.5x larger than its active user base;
- X removes more fake accounts each year than its active user count.
Instead of talking about this issue through numbers alone, the students turned the conversation into an interactive experience.
The result was “Bot or Not?” — a retro-inspired game where players have 120 seconds to identify bot-generated comments hidden inside simulated social media discussions.
Users can choose different topics, from lighter debates like pineapple on pizza to more polarizing subjects such as immigration and women’s rights. They can also customize bot personalities and behavior, making the experience feel unsettlingly realistic.
Nearly half of participants failed
The installation also became a live research experiment. A total of 710 participants took part in the challenge and agreed to share their results afterward. The findings showed that distinguishing bots from humans is becoming increasingly difficult:
- 53% of participants succeeded;
- 47% failed to correctly identify the bots.
The research also revealed a strong age divide. Younger participants were significantly better at spotting bots, while performance sharply declined among users over 40.
Beyond detection itself, the experiment highlighted another growing issue: people are increasingly likely to mistake real humans for bots — contributing to distrust, misinformation, and hostile online environments. You can explore Surfshark’s expanded research on bot detection and AI-generated online activity here.
Surfshark and cybersecurity advocacy
For us, “Bot or Not?” represented a new way to talk about cybersecurity awareness — one that feels interactive, human, and impossible to ignore.
The initiative became one of the inspirations behind Surfshark’s Cybersecurity Advocacy Fund, a program designed to support students, researchers, and creatives working on ideas that help people better understand today’s digital risks. The first application round opens this September, and you can already explore the fund’s criteria and Terms & Conditions here.
The game is now available online for everyone to play and test their own ability to spot AI-generated content online.
