Social media platforms like Twitter and Reddit are increasingly infested with bots and fake accounts, leading to significant manipulation of public discourse. These bots don’t just annoy users—they skew visibility through vote manipulation. Fake accounts and automated scripts systematically downvote posts opposing certain viewpoints, distorting the content that surfaces and amplifying specific agendas.
Before coming to Lemmy, I was systematically downvoted by bots on Reddit for completely normal comments that were relatively neutral and not controversial at all. Seemed to be no pattern in it… One time I commented that my favorite game was WoW, down voted -15 for no apparent reason.
For example, a bot on Twitter using an API call to GPT-4o ran out of funding and started posting their prompts and system information publicly.
https://www.dailydot.com/debug/chatgpt-bot-x-russian-campaign-meme/
Bots like these are probably in the tens or hundreds of thousands. They did a huge ban wave of bots on Reddit, and some major top level subreddits were quiet for days because of it. Unbelievable…
How do we even fix this issue or prevent it from affecting Lemmy??
For example, a bot on Twitter using an API call to GPT-4o ran out of funding and started posting their prompts and system information publicly.
While there’s obviously botspam out there, this post is clearly a fake as anyone with the programming experience will notice immediately. It’s just engagemeb bait
People know shit is engagement slop but will proceed to interact with it because it confirmed their bias…
I am glad clever people like yourselves are looking into this. Best of luck.
A chain/tree of trust. If a particular parent node has trusted a lot of users that proves to be malicious bots, you break the chain of trust by removing the parent node. Orphaned real users would then need to find a new account that is willing to trust them, while the bots are left out hanging.
Not sure how well it would work on federated platforms though.
I don’t think that would work well, because I knew no one when I came here.
You could always ask someone to vouch for you. It could also be that you have open communities and closed communities. So you would build up trust in an open community before being trusted by someone to be allowed to interact with the closed communities. Open communities could be communities less interesting/harder for the bots to spam and closed communities could be the high risk ones, such as news and politics.
Would this greatly reduce the user friendliness of the site? Yes. But it would be an option if bots turn into a serious problem.
I haven’t really thought through the details and I’m not sure how well it would work for a decentralised network though. Would each instance run their own trust tree, or would trusted instances share a single trust database 🤷♂️
This is another reason why a lack of transparency with user votes is bad.
As to why it is seemingly done randomly in reddit, it is to decrease your global karma score to make you less influential and to discourage you from making new comments. You probably pissed off someone’s troll farm in what they considered an influential subreddit. It might also interest you that reddit was explicitly named as part of a Russian influence effort here: https://www.justice.gov/opa/media/1366201/dl - maybe some day we will see something similar for other obvious troll farms operating in Reddit.
You have to watch where you are if you call out a bot, you’ll have your comment removed and get banned. They tell you to report the bot and they’ll take care of it. Then when you report the obvious troll/bot they ban you for it. Some shady mods out there.
Which is expensive right? Like it’s not cheap to call that API
Some sort of “report as bot” --> required captcha pipeline would be useful
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Make bot accounts a separate type of account so legitimate bots don’t appear as users. These can’t vote, are filtered out of post counts and users can be presented with more filtering option for them. Bot accounts are clearly marked.
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Heavily rate limit any API that enables posting to a normal user account.
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Make having a bot on a human user account bannable offence and enforce it strongly.
filtered out of post counts
Revolutionary. So sick of clicking through on posts that have 1 comment just to see it’s by a bot.
Exactly the reason I suggest it.
This. I’m surprised Lemmy hasn’t already done this, as it’s such a huge glaring issue in Reddit (that they don’t care about, because bots are engagement…)
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By being small and unimportant
Excellent. That’s basically my super power.
That’s the sad truth of it. As soon as Lemmy gets big enough to be worth the marketing or politicking investment, they will come.
Same thing happened to Reddit, and every small subreddit I’ve been a part of
just like me!
That’s flux, isn’t it?
Aye, flux [pro] via glif.app, though it’s funny, sometimes I get better results from the smaller [schnell] model, depending on the use case.
How do we even fix this issue or prevent it from affecting Lemmy??
Simple. Just scream that everyone whose opinion you dislike is a bot.
I admit I’ve been guilty of this in the past, so sarcasm aside I cannot recommend this as a strategy for detecting actual bots … even though if you’re parroting the opinion those who have power & control bots wish you to believe, expressing that opinion makes one’s post functionally equivalent to that of a bot. I KNOW, SUE ME 🤷♂️
I cannot recommend this as a strategy for detecting actual bots
That’s because it isn’t one. It’s a means by which people attempt to impose orthodoxy.
I think the larger problem is that we are now trying to be non-controversal to avoid downvotes.
Who thinks it’s a good idea to self censor on social media? Because that’s what you are doing, because of the downvote system.
I will never agree downvotes are a net positive. They create censorship and allows the ignorant mob or bots to push down things they don’t like reading.
Bots make it worse of course, since they can just downvote whatever they are programmed to downvote, and upvote things that they want to be visible. Basically it’s like having an army of minions to manipulate entire platforms.
All because of downvotes and upvotes. Of course there should be a way to express that you agree or disagree but should that affect visibility directly? I don’t think so.
A few things.
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Admins can and do ban accounts that downvote rampantly
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Obvious bot brigading is obvious. It became harder to tell on reddit when they started fuzzing the vote numbers, but could frequently still be figured out. It’s easier on Lemmy, someone just has to report some unusual voting pattern to the admin and they can check if the voting accounts look like bots.
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I was once told that the algorithm is less weighted towards upvoted comments and more weighted towards recent comments on Lemmy, when compared with Reddit. I am not sure if this is true, but I have noticed that recent comments tend to rise above the top upvoted comments in threads when viewing by Hot.
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Without any way for bad content to be filtered out, you just end up with an endless stream of undifferentiated noise. The voting system actually protects the platform from the encroachment of bots and the ignorant mob, because it helps filter them out from the users who have something of value that they want to contribute.
For example, imagine a post where three users comment:
One posts a heated stream of idiocy, falsehoods, and outright nastiness, thinly veiled bigotry and other garbage. Paragraphs of it, all poorly written.
Another is some basic comment not saying anything of any real consequence. Completely mundane to the point no one has upvoted it, but it is perfectly harmless.
The final is a comment with some meat on it and something to add to the conversation, but unfortunately they arrived too late to the thread. No one saw it, so no one upvoted it.
Without downvotes, all three of these comments are treated exactly the same.
I get downvotes can suck sometimes but they’re a valuable aspect to this system and removing them does not make the place better.
I’d argue what people need to do if these things are genuinely bothering them is turn off the scores entirely and learn to live without them. It’s better for your mental health.
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That’s just what comes with internet becoming mainstream so mainstream cultural standards are applied to online conversations. It’s the difference between an opera and a punk club or something.
opera and a punk
And which one is the mainstream in this analogy? :)
Rather obvious punk.
Negative Karma on a post means people cared enough about your writing to downvote it.
GPT-4o
Its kind of hilarious that they’re using American APIs to do this. It would be like them buying Ukranian weapons, when they have the blueprints for them already.
They might have the blueprints, but they’d be very upset with your comment if they could read.
