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/
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??
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.
Heavily rate limit any API that enables posting to a normal user account.
Make having a bot on a human user account bannable offence and enforce it strongly.
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...)