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/

Example shown here

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??

  • FourPacketsOfPeanuts@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    Keep Lemmy small. Make the influence of conversation here uninteresting.

    Or … bite the bullet and carry out one-time id checks via a $1 charge. Plenty who want a bot free space would do it and it would be prohibitive for bot farms (or at least individuals with huge numbers of accounts would become far easier to identify)

    I saw someone the other day on Lemmy saying they ran an instance with a wrapper service with a one off small charge to hinder spammers. Don’t know how that’s going

    • farcaster@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      Keep Lemmy small. Make the influence of conversation here uninteresting.

      I’m doing my part!

    • oce 🐆@jlai.luEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      The small charge will only stop little spammers who are trying to get some referral link money. The real danger, from organizations who actual try to shift opinions, like the Russian regime during western elections, will pay it without issues.

      • oce 🐆@jlai.luEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        Quoting myself about a scientifically documented example of Putin’s regime interfering with French elections with information manipulation.

        This a French scientific study showing how the Russian regime tries to influence the political debate in France with Twitter accounts, especially before the last parliamentary elections. The goal is to promote a party that is more favorable to them, namely, the far right. https://hal.science/hal-04629585v1/file/Chavalarias_23h50_Putin_s_Clock.pdf

        In France, we have a concept called the “Republican front” that is kind of tacit agreement between almost all parties, left, center and right, to work together to prevent far-right from reaching power and threaten the values of the French Republic. This front has been weakening at every election, with the far right rising and lately some of the traditional right joining them. But it still worked out at the last one, far right was given first by the polls, but thanks to the front, they eventually ended up 3rd.

        What this article says, is that the Russian regime has been working for years to invert this front and push most parties to consider that it is part of the left that is against the Republic values, more than the far right. One of their most cynical tactic is using videos from the Gaza war to traumatize leftists until they say something that may sound antisemitic. Then they repost those words and push the agenda that the left is antisemitic and therefore against the Republican values.