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??

  • GrayBackgroundMusicEnglish
    19·
    11 days ago

    One time I commented that my favorite game was WoW, down voted -15 for no apparent reason.

    I wouldn’t use that as evidence that you were bot-attacked. A lot of people don’t like WoW and are mad at it for disappointing them. *coughSHADOWLANDScough*

    • doctortranEnglish
      4·
      10 days ago

      I’m shocked I had to come down this far to find this.

      They’re talking about bots, but that doesn’t in any way sound abnormal. People downvote comments like that all the time for their own satisfaction.