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??

  • explodicleEnglish
    3·
    3 months ago

    Not a full solution, but… can you block users by wildcard? IMHO everyone who has “.eth" or ".btc” as their user name is not worth listening to. Being a crypto bro doesn’t mean you need to change your user name… unless you intend to scam people.

    I’ll revise my opinion if rappers ever make crypto names cool.

    • Buttflapper@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      22·
      3 months ago

      can you block users by wildcard?

      Nope. You also can’t prevent users from viewing your profile. It’s not like Facebook where you block someone, they’re gone and can’t even see you. On Reddit, they can see you, and just log onto another account to harass and downvote you.