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
    253·
    3 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

    • oce 🐆@jlai.luEnglish
      261·
      3 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
        12·
        3 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.

      • Hello_there@fedia.io
        3·
        3 months ago

        Yeah, but once you charge a CC# you can ban that number in the future. It’s not perfect but you can raise the hurdle a bit.

    • farcaster@lemmy.worldEnglish
      17·
      3 months ago

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

      I’m doing my part!

    • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      3·
      3 months ago

      Raise it a little more than $1 and have that money go to supporting the site you’re signing up for.

      This has worked well for 25 years for MetaFilter (I think they charge $5-10). It used to work well on SomethingAwful as well.

    • thehatfox@lemmy.worldEnglish
      41·
      3 months ago

      Creating a cost barrier to participation is possibly one of the better ways to deter bot activity.

      Charging money to register or even post on a platform is one method. There are administrative and ethical challenges to overcome though, especially for non-commercial platforms like Lemmy.

      CAPTCHA systems are another, which costs human labour to solve a puzzle before gaining access.

      There had been some attempts to use proof of work based systems to combat email spam in the past, which puts a computing resource cost in place. Crypto might have poisoned the well on that one though.

      All of these are still vulnerable to state level actors though, who have large pools of financial, human, and machine resources to spend on manipulation.

      Maybe instead the best way to protect communities from such attacks is just to remain small and insignificant enough to not attract attention in the first place.

    • talEnglish
      1·
      3 months ago

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

      That’s a significant constraint and it’s probably possible to reuse a lot of the costs in developing a both for another platform.

      Or … bite the bullet and carry out one-time id checks via a $1 charge.

      Yeah, making identities expensive helps. But…you note that the bot that OP posted clearly had the bot operator pay for a blue checkmark there. So it wasn’t enough in that case.