As technology advances and computers become increasingly capable, the line between human and bot activity on social media platforms like Lemmy is becoming blurred.
What are your thoughts on this matter? How do you think social media platforms, particularly Lemmy, should handle advanced bots in the future?
I’ve just accepted that if a bot interaction has the same impact on me as someone who is making up a fictional backstory, I’m not really worried wheter it is a bot or not. A bot shilling for Musk or a person shilling for Musk because they bought the hype are basically the same thing.
In my opinion the main problem with bots is not individual acccounts pretending to be people, but the damage they can do en masse through a firehose of spam posts, comments, and manipulating engagement mechanics like up/down votes. At that point there is no need for an individual account to be convincing because it is lost in the sea of trash.
It’s the scale that changes. One bot can be replicated much easier than a human shill.
Even more problematic are entire communities made out of astroturfing bots. This kind of stuff is increasingly easy and cheap to set up and will fool most people looking for advise online.
I am convinced that the bidet shills on reddit are bots. There’s just no way that hundreds of thousands of people are suddenly interested in shitting appliances.
Big Bidet at it again