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??
Just because it's not a bot, doesn't mean it's free expression. Several governments are paying thousands of people to push and argue propaganda.
If a person is ID as a bad a faith actor, then it is a different situation
I can think of 4 users from memory who are outspoken propaganizers.
They're the champions of hexbear and .ml
They each post about every 90 minutes on average
I can't tell if ml tankies are a foreign threat actors tbh
They seem to engage but it is pretty easy to test limits of what they will discuss. They will revert back to copy pasting some poorly sourced bullshit about USSR great 🤡
They don't spam it, so I am assuming real people sitting in a weird ideological box.
If they take Russian money to do thisz they'd hould be banned
We recently had a thread about some alt right clown taking russian money for their "work"
Regime whores don't get second chances IMHO