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??
1. The platform needs an incentive to get rid of bots.
Bots on Reddit pump out an advertiser friendly firehose of "content" that they can pretend is real to their investors, while keeping people scrolling longer. On Fediverse platforms there isn't a need for profit or growth. Low quality spam just becomes added server load we need to pay for.
I've mentioned it before, but we ban bots very fast here. People report them fast and we remove them fast. Searching the same scam link on Reddit brought up accounts that have been posting the same garbage for months.
Twitter and Reddit benefit from bot activity, and don't have an incentive to stop it.
2. We need tools to detect the bots so we can remove them.
Public vote counts should help a lot towards catching manipulation on the fediverse. Any action that can affect visibility (upvotes and comments) can be pulled by researchers through federation to study/catch inorganic behavior.
Since the platforms are open source, instances could even set up tools that look for patterns locally, before it gets out.
It'll be an arm's race, but it wouldn't be impossible.
interesting. Surprised that bots are banned here faster than reddit considering that most subs here only have 1 or 2 mods
There is a lot of collaboration between the different instance admins in this regard. The lemmy.world admins have a matrix room that is chock full of other instance admins where they share bots that they find to help do things like find similar posters and set up filters to block things like spammy urls. The nice thing about it all is that I am not an admin, but because it is a public room, anybody can sit in there and see the discussion in real time. Compare that to corporate social media like reddit or facebook where there is zero transparency.
I'd love to see some type of Adblock like crowd sourced block lists. If the growth of other platforms is any indication there will probably be a day where it would be nice to block out a large amounts of accounts. I'd even pay for it.