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??
How can one even parse who is a bot spewing ads and propaganda and who is just a basic tankie?
They both get the same scripts.. it's an impossible task.
Easy solution, report bad content. It doesn't matter if it's a bot or a tankie.
Report a tankie-post in a tankie-sub and watch as nothing happens.
Those mods love it when the correct genocide happens.
Just because it's not a bot, doesn't mean it's free expression. Several governments are paying thousands of people to push and argue propaganda.
I can think of 4 users from memory who are outspoken propaganizers.
They're the champions of hexbear and .ml
They each post about every 90 minutes on average
I'm not saying they should be immediately silenced, but they should be reported. The moderators can then look at their post history and decide whether to ban based on instance/community rules.
Hopefully, we pick decent enough admins and mods that we'll generally do the latter. But the former can be really annoying as well when it involves denying other facts.
Other than the political misinformation, dangerous comments must be silenced, like ones recommending we drink bleach to heal ourselves... just an example. Free speech is not an open invitation to lie, misinform, incite wanton violence etc... The limit to free speech is that line beyond which we cause harm.
nothing wrong with tankies, they just need to speak better LMAO.