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??

  • wewbullEnglish
    732·
    1 month ago

    1. Make bot accounts a separate type of account so legitimate bots don’t appear as users. These can’t vote, are filtered out of post counts and users can be presented with more filtering option for them. Bot accounts are clearly marked.

    2. Heavily rate limit any API that enables posting to a normal user account.

    3. Make having a bot on a human user account bannable offence and enforce it strongly.

    • zkfcfbzrEnglish
      170·
      1 month ago

      filtered out of post counts

      Revolutionary. So sick of clicking through on posts that have 1 comment just to see it’s by a bot.

      • wewbullEnglish
        50·
        1 month ago

        Exactly the reason I suggest it.

    • brucethemooseEnglish
      50·
      1 month ago

      This. I’m surprised Lemmy hasn’t already done this, as it’s such a huge glaring issue in Reddit (that they don’t care about, because bots are engagement…)

    • nadramEnglish
      20·
      1 month ago

      How do you make a bot register as a bot?

      • wewbullEnglish
        20·
        1 month ago

        Points 2 and 3. Basically make restrictions on normal user accounts which are fine for humans but that will make bots swear and curse.

        Unless you mean “what should the registration process be” I think API keys via a user account would do.