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??

  • 1984@lemmy.todayEnglish
    357·
    4 months ago

    I think the larger problem is that we are now trying to be non-controversal to avoid downvotes.

    Who thinks it’s a good idea to self censor on social media? Because that’s what you are doing, because of the downvote system.

    I will never agree downvotes are a net positive. They create censorship and allows the ignorant mob or bots to push down things they don’t like reading.

    Bots make it worse of course, since they can just downvote whatever they are programmed to downvote, and upvote things that they want to be visible. Basically it’s like having an army of minions to manipulate entire platforms.

    All because of downvotes and upvotes. Of course there should be a way to express that you agree or disagree but should that affect visibility directly? I don’t think so.

    • areyouevenreal@lemm.eeEnglish
      4·
      4 months ago

      At this point you might as well complain about the mods and admins on Lemmy as tons of them are out of wack. I have had comments removed for stating facts that every should know just because it doesn’t agree with the lemmy hivemind. For example say anything positive about AI or how it was used before the likes of ChatGPT came around.

    • gap_betweenus@lemmy.worldEnglish
      41·
      4 months ago

      That’s just what comes with internet becoming mainstream so mainstream cultural standards are applied to online conversations. It’s the difference between an opera and a punk club or something.

    • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      3·
      4 months ago

      i dont self censor, it’s about a 50 50, as to be expected per random stats. Or at least that’s what it feels like, it’s probably better than that lmao.

      It’s just numbers, it’s not going to kill you lol.