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 would this be enforceable, though? Part of the benefit of the Fediverse is that multiple different apps can communicate with each other (for example, you can see Lemmy posts on Mastodon). Even if Lemmy implements something like this, what’s to stop someone from commenting using a different app that doesn’t implement it?
I’m actually surprised we don’t see more spam on ActivityPub-powered systems, since spammers don’t even need to have an account with Lemmy, Mastodon, etc and could instead have their own ActivityPub server to send the spam. I guess they don’t do that since the spam instance would be defederated pretty quickly.