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??

  • KillingTimeItself
    link
    fedilink
    English
    2
    edit-2
    3 months ago

    it would have to be fundamental to the platform, i believe a few platforms have something similar where this generates a unique “key” used to identify the user.

    I think I2P does this?

    • @half_built_pyramids
      link
      English
      23 months ago

      If the bots are already using gpt4 then a little crypto heat is essentially the same thing

      • KillingTimeItself
        link
        fedilink
        English
        13 months ago

        you’d still need to front it on the bot farm side though. Shit’s still costly.

        Regardless, if it’s not enough, just make it more lmao.