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??

  • Lvxferre@mander.xyzEnglish
    9·
    2 months ago

    You’re right that it won’t be completely undesirable for bots, ever. However, you can make it less desirable, to the point that the botters say “meh, who cares? That other site is better to bot”.

    I’ll give you an example. Suppose the following two social platforms:

    • Orange Alien: large userbase, overexcited about consumption, people get banned for mocking brands, the typical user is as tech-illiterate enough to confuse your bot with a human.
    • White Rat: Small userbase, full of communists, even the non-communists tend to outright mock consumption, the typical user is extremely tech-savvy so they spot and report your bot all the time.

    If you’re a botter advertising some junk, you’ll probably want to bot in both platforms, but that is not always viable - coding the framework for the bots takes time, you don’t have infinite bandwidth and processing power, etc. So you’re likely going to prioritise Orange Alien, you’ll only bot White Rat if you can spare it some effort+resources.

    The main issue with point #1 is that there’s only so much room to make the environment unattractive to bots before doing it for humans too. Like, you don’t want to shrink your userbase on purpose, right? You can still do things like promoting people to hold a more critical view, teaching them how to detect bots, asking them to report them (that also helps with #4), but it only goes so far.

    [Sorry for the wall of text.]

    • beefbot@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      7·
      2 months ago

      This is the sort of thoughtful reasoning that I’m glad to see here, so a wall of text was warranted! Thanks for taking the time to add to the discussion 👍🙏