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??
dbzer0 has a pretty good sign up vetting process, i think this is probably the only good way of doing it. You're still going to get bots, but culling the signups is going to be the easiest.
TL;DR just move over to dbzer0 and dont leave the instance :)
Also i think on sites like reddit, a lot of the downvoting is just "mass protest" theory in action, people see a comment with downvotes and then downvote it. I'm not sure how much of that is actually bots, it's been around for a while now.