Technology

60462 readers

3886 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

565

Bots are running rampant. How do we stop them from ruining Lemmy? (lemmy.world)

submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

288 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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??

(page 3) 50 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 months ago (1 children)

GPT-4o

Its kind of hilarious that they're using American APIs to do this. It would be like them buying Ukranian weapons, when they have the blueprints for them already.

load more comments (1 replies)

[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 months ago

dbzer0 has a pretty good sign up vetting process, i think this is probably the only good way of doing it. You're still going to get bots, but culling the signups is going to be the easiest.

TL;DR just move over to dbzer0 and dont leave the instance :)

Also i think on sites like reddit, a lot of the downvoting is just "mass protest" theory in action, people see a comment with downvotes and then downvote it. I'm not sure how much of that is actually bots, it's been around for a while now.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago

You have to watch where you are if you call out a bot, you'll have your comment removed and get banned. They tell you to report the bot and they'll take care of it. Then when you report the obvious troll/bot they ban you for it. Some shady mods out there.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago

Bots after getting banned: 📉📉📉📉

[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 months ago

Lemmy.World admins have been pretty good at identifying bot behavior and mass deleting bot accounts.

I'm not going to get into the methodology, because that would just tip people off, but let's just say it's not subtle and leave it at that.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago

Ban them all.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Implement a cryptographic web of trust system on top of Lemmy. People meet to exchange keys and sign them on Lemmy's system. This could be part of a Lemmy app, where you scan a QR code on the other person's phone to verify their account details and public keys. Web of trust systems have historically been cumbersome for most users. With the right UI, it doesn't have to be.

Have some kind of incentive to get verified on the web of trust system. Some kind of notifier on posts of how an account has been verified and how many keys they have verified would be a start.

Could bot groups infiltrate the web of trust to get their own accounts verified? Yes, but they can also be easily cut off when discovered.

load more comments (1 replies)

load more comments