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??
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.
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.
And which one is the mainstream in this analogy? :)
Rather obvious punk.