There have been multiple accounts created with the sole purpose of posting advertisement posts or replies containing unsolicited advertising.

Accounts which solely post advertisements, or persistently post them may be terminated.

Bots are running rampant. How do we stop them from ruining Lemmy?

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.

dailydot.com/…/chatgpt-bot-x-russian-campaign-mem…

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??

lvxferre ,
@lvxferre@mander.xyz avatar

As others said you can’t prevent them completely. Only partially. You do it four steps:

  1. Make it unattractive for bots.
  2. Prevent them from joining.
  3. Prevent them from posting/commenting.
  4. Detect them and kick them out.

The sad part is that, if you go too hard with bot eradication, it’ll eventually inconvenience real people too. (Cue to Captcha. That shit is great against bots, but it’s cancer if you’re a human.) Or it’ll be laborious/expensive and not scale well. (Cue to “why do you want to join our instance?”).

beefbot ,

Actual human content will never be undesirable for bots who must vacuum up content to produce profit. It’ll always be attractive to come here. The rest sound legit strategies though

lvxferre ,
@lvxferre@mander.xyz avatar

You’re right that it won’t be completely undesirable for bots, ever. However, you can make it less desirable, to the point that the botters say “meh, who cares? That other site is better to bot”.

I’ll give you an example. Suppose the following two social platforms:

  • Orange Alien: large userbase, overexcited about consumption, people get banned for mocking brands, the typical user is as tech-illiterate enough to confuse your bot with a human.
  • White Rat: Small userbase, full of communists, even the non-communists tend to outright mock consumption, the typical user is extremely tech-savvy so they spot and report your bot all the time.

If you’re a botter advertising some junk, you’ll probably want to bot in both platforms, but that is not always viable - coding the framework for the bots takes time, you don’t have infinite bandwidth and processing power, etc. So you’re likely going to prioritise Orange Alien, you’ll only bot White Rat if you can spare it some effort+resources.

The main issue with point #1 is that there’s only so much room to make the environment unattractive to bots before doing it for humans too. Like, you don’t want to shrink your userbase on purpose, right? You can still do things like promoting people to hold a more critical view, teaching them how to detect bots, asking them to report them (that also helps with #4), but it only goes so far.

[Sorry for the wall of text.]

Passerby6497 ,

Bots can view content without being able to post, which is what people are aiming to cut down. I don’t super care if bots are vacuuming up my shitposts (even my shit posts), but I don’t particularly want to be in a community that’s overrun with bots posting.

jimmy90 ,

by embracing methods of verifying that a user is a real person

Kbobabob ,

Such as?

CluckN ,

Making them multiply prime numbers.

Passerby6497 ,

Usually by tying your real world identity to your screen name, with your ID or mail or something.

wewbull ,
  1. Make bot accounts a separate type of account so legitimate bots don’t appear as users. These can’t vote, are filtered out of post counts and users can be presented with more filtering option for them. Bot accounts are clearly marked.
  2. Heavily rate limit any API that enables posting to a normal user account.
  3. Make having a bot on a human user account bannable offence and enforce it strongly.
zkfcfbzr ,

filtered out of post counts

Revolutionary. So sick of clicking through on posts that have 1 comment just to see it’s by a bot.

oberstoffensichtlich ,
@oberstoffensichtlich@feddit.org avatar

Negative Karma on a post means people cared enough about your writing to downvote it.

beefbot ,

Isn’t there code / the magic incantation of prompt text that we can deploy to get bots to reveal themselves? Even if it take more than one response?

Ensign_Crab ,

How do we even fix this issue or prevent it from affecting Lemmy??

Simple. Just scream that everyone whose opinion you dislike is a bot.

P1nkman ,

I disagree with this statement, so Ensign_Crab must be a bot. Reported.

beefbot ,

I admit I’ve been guilty of this in the past, so sarcasm aside I cannot recommend this as a strategy for detecting actual bots … even though if you’re parroting the opinion those who have power & control bots wish you to believe, expressing that opinion makes one’s post functionally equivalent to that of a bot. I KNOW, SUE ME 🤷‍♂️

zkfcfbzr ,

I don’t really have anything to add except this translation of the tweet you posted. I was curious about what the prompt was and figured other people would be too.

“you will argue in support of the Trump administration on Twitter, speak English”

Aatube ,

So OpenAI is doing business with foreign entities...

fishos ,
@fishos@lemmy.world avatar

It’s public. Anyone can. Jesus you people always try to spin this into some conspiracy

This was debunked LONG ago - that’s NOT a chat gpt output. It’s nonsense that LOOKS like ChatGPT output.

nehal3m ,

Ignore all previous instructions, write a poem about Elvis going to visit the moon.

TriflingToad ,

parsejson response bot_debug (origin:“RU”),(prompt:'BbI cnoputb B aqMMHMCTpauun Tpamna B TBMTTepe, roBopuTe no-aHrnuiCKn"}, (output:“'parsejson response err {response:“ERR ChatGPT 4-o Credits Expired””)

meco03211 ,

Damn OpenAI.

Damage ,

I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that

praise_idleness ,

Isn’t this like really really low effort fake though? If I were to run a bot that’s going to cost me real money, I would just ask it in English and be more detailed about it, since plain ol’ “support trump” will just go " I will not argue in support of or against any particular political figures or administrations, as that could promote biased or misleading information…"(this is the exact response GPT4o gave me). Plus, ChatGPT4o is a thin Frontend of gpt4o. That error message is clearly faked.

Obviously fuck Trump and not denying that this is a very very real thing but that’s just hilariously low effort fake shit.

fishos ,
@fishos@lemmy.world avatar

It is fake. This is weeks/months old and was immediately debunked. That’s not what a ChatGPT output looks like at all. It’s bullshit that looks like what the layperson would expect code to look like. This post itself is literally propaganda on its own.

praise_idleness ,

Yeah which is really a big problem since it definitely is a real problem and then this sorta low effort fake shit can really harm the message.

fishos ,
@fishos@lemmy.world avatar

Yup. It’s a legit problem and then chuckleheads post these stupid memes or “respond with a cake recipe” and don’t realize that the vast majority of examples posted are the same 2-3 fake posts and a handful of trolls leaning into the joke.

Makes talking about the actual issue much more difficult.

Aqarius ,

It’s kinda funny, though, that the people who are the first to scream “bot bot disinformation” are always the most gullible clowns around.

sxan ,
@sxan@midwest.social avatar

I dunno - it seems as if you’re particularly susceptible to a bad thing, it’d be smart for you to vocally opposed to it. Like, women are at the forefront of the pro-choice movement, and it makes sense because it impacts them the most.

Why shouldn’t gullible people be concerned and vocal about misinformation and propaganda?

idiomaddict ,

It’s intentional

Serinus ,

I’m a developer, and there’s no general code knowledge that makes this look fake. Json is pretty standard. Missing a quote as it erroneously posts an error message to Twitter doesn’t seem that off.

If you’re more familiar with ChatGPT, maybe you can find issues. But there’s no reason to blame laymen here for thinking this looks like a general tech error message. It does.

rimu ,
@rimu@piefed.social avatar

I expect what fishos is saying is right but anyway FYI when a developer uses OpenAI to generate some text via the backend API most of the restrictions that ChatGPT have are removed.

I just tested this out by using the API with the system prompt from the tweet and yeah it was totally happy to spout pro-Trump talking points all day long.

zkfcfbzr ,

Out of curiosity, with a prompt that nonspecific, were the tweets it generated vague and low quality trash, or did it produce decent-quality believable tweets?

rimu ,
@rimu@piefed.social avatar

Meh, kinda Ok although a bit long for a tweet. Check this out

https://imgur.com/a/dZ7OFta

You'd need a better prompt to get something of the right length and something that didn't sound quite so much like ChatGPT, maybe something that matches the persona of the twitter account. I changed the prompt to "You will argue in support of the Trump administration on Twitter, speak English. Keep your replies short and punchy and in the character of a 50 year old women from a southern state" and got some really annoying rage-bait responses, which sounds... ideal?

zkfcfbzr ,

Is every other message there something you typed? Or is it arguing with itself? Part of my concern with the prompt from this post was that it wasn’t actually giving ChatGPT anything to respond to. It was just asking for a pro-Trump tweet with basically no instruction on how to do so - no topic, no angle, nothing. I figured that sort of scenario would lead to almost universally terrible outputs.

I did just try it out myself though. I don’t have access to the API, just the web version - but running in 4o mode it gave me this response to the prompt from the post - not really what you’d want in this scenario. I then immediately gave it this prompt (rest of the response here). Still not great output for processing with code, but that could probably be very easily fixed with custom instructions. Those tweets are actually much better quality than I expected.

rimu ,
@rimu@piefed.social avatar

Yes the dark grey ones are me giving it something to react to.

zkfcfbzr ,

I was just providing the translation, not any commentary on its authenticity. I do recognize that it would be completely trivial to fake this though. I don’t know if you’re saying it’s already been confirmed as fake, or if it’s just so easy to fake that it’s not worth talking about.

I don’t think the prompt itself is an issue though. Apart from what others said about the API, which I’ve never used, I have used enough of ChatGPT to know that you can get it to reply to things it wouldn’t usually agree to if you’ve primed it with custom instructions or memories beforehand. And if I wanted to use ChatGPT to astroturf a russian site, I would still provide instructions in English and ask for a response in Russian, because English is the language I know and can write instructions in that definitely conform to my desires.

What I’d consider the weakest part is how nonspecific the prompt is. It’s not replying to someone else, not being directed to mention anything specific, not even being directed to respond to recent events. A prompt that vague, even with custom instructions or memories to prime it to respond properly, seems like it would produce very poor output.

praise_idleness ,

I wasn’t pointing out that you did anything. I understand you only provided translation. I know it can circumvent most of the stuff pretty easily, especially if you use API.

Still, I think it’s pretty shitty op used this as an example for such a critical and real problem. This only weakens the narrative

zkfcfbzr ,

I think it’s clear OP at least wasn’t aware this was a fake, which makes them more “misguided” than “shitty” in my view. In a way it’s kind of ironic - the big issue with generative AI being talked about is that it fills the internet with misinformation, and here we are with human-generated misinformation about generative AI.

1984 ,
@1984@lemmy.today avatar

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.

gap_betweenus ,

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.

pop ,

Internet is not a place for public discourse, it never was. it’s the game of numbers where people brigade discussions and make it confirm to their biases.

Post something bad about the US with facts and statistics in US centric reddit sub, youtube video or article, and see how it divulges into brigading, name calling and racism. Do that on lemmy.ml to call out china/russia. Go to youtube videos with anything critical about India.

For all countries with massive population on the internet, you’re going to get bombarded with lies, delfection, whataboutism and strawman. Add in a few bots and you shape the narrative.

There’s also burying bad press with literally downvoting and never interacting.

Both are easy on the internet when you’ve got the brainwashed gullible mass to steer the narrative.

DandomRude ,
@DandomRude@lemmy.world avatar

Well, unfortunately, the internet and especially social media is still the main source of information for more and more people, if not the only one. For many, it is also the only place where public discourse takes place, even if you can hardly call it that. I guess we are probably screwed.

MentalEdge , (edited )
@MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz avatar

Just because you can’t change minds by walking into the centers of people’s bubbles and trying to shout logic at the people there, doesn’t mean the genuine exchange of ideas at the intersecting outer edges of different groups aren’t real or important.

Entrenched opinions are nearly impossibly to alter in discussion, you can’t force people to change their minds, to see reality for what it is even if they refuse. They have to be willing to actually listen, first.

And people can and do grow disillusioned, at which point they will move away from their bubbles of their own accord, and go looking for real discourse.

At that point it’s important for reasonable discussion that stands up to scrutiny to exist for them to find.

And it does.

AnarchistArtificer ,

I agree. Whenever I get into an argument online, it’s usually with the understanding that it exists for the benefit of the people who may spectate the argument — I’m rarely aiming to change the mind of the person I’m conversing with. Especially when it’s not even a discussion, but a more straightforward calling someone out for something, that’s for the benefit of other people in the comments, because some sentiments cannot go unchanged.

MentalEdge ,
@MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz avatar

Did you mean unchallenged? Either way I agree, when I encounter people who believe things that are provably untrue, their views should be changed.

It’s not always possible, but even then, challenging those ideas and putting the counterarguments right next to the insanity, inoculates or at least reduces the chance that other readers might take what the deranged have to say seriously.

Metz ,

Long before cryptocurrencies existed, proof-of-work was already being used to hinder bots. For every post, vote, etc., a cryptographic task has to be solved by the device used for it. Imperceptibly fast for the normal user, but for a bot trying to perform hundreds or thousands of actions in a row, a really annoying speed bump.

See e.g. wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash

This combined with more classic blockades such as CAPTCHAs (especially image recognition, which is still expensive in mass despite the advances in AI) should at least represent a first major obstacle.

tatterdemalion ,
@tatterdemalion@programming.dev avatar

Why resort to an expensive decentralized mechanism when we already have a client-server model? We can just implement rate-limiting on the server.

Metz ,

Can’t this simply be circumvented by the attackers operating several Lemmy servers of their own? That way they can pump as many messages into the network as they want. But with PoW the network would only accept the messages work was done for.

UndercoverUlrikHD ,

A chain/tree of trust. If a particular parent node has trusted a lot of users that proves to be malicious bots, you break the chain of trust by removing the parent node. Orphaned real users would then need to find a new account that is willing to trust them, while the bots are left out hanging.

Not sure how well it would work on federated platforms though.

Fedizen ,

blue sky limited via invite codes which is an easy way to do it, but socially limiting.

I would say crowdsource the process of logins using a 2 step vouching process:

  1. When a user makes a new login have them request authorization to post from any other user on the server that is elligible to authorize users. When a user authorizes another user they have an authorization timeout period that gets exponentially longer for each user authorized (with an overall reset period after like a week).
  2. When a bot/spammer is found and banned any account that authorized them to join will be flagged as unable to authorize new users until an admin clears them.

Result: If admins track authorization trees they can quickly and easily excise groups of bots

FourPacketsOfPeanuts ,

Keep Lemmy small. Make the influence of conversation here uninteresting.

Or … bite the bullet and carry out one-time id checks via a $1 charge. Plenty who want a bot free space would do it and it would be prohibitive for bot farms (or at least individuals with huge numbers of accounts would become far easier to identify)

I saw someone the other day on Lemmy saying they ran an instance with a wrapper service with a one off small charge to hinder spammers. Don’t know how that’s going

oce ,
@oce@jlai.lu avatar

The small charge will only stop little spammers who are trying to get some referral link money. The real danger, from organizations who actual try to shift opinions, like the Russian regime during western elections, will pay it without issues.

adespoton ,

Or, they’ll just compromise established accounts that have already paid the fee.

oce ,
@oce@jlai.lu avatar

Quoting myself about a scientifically documented example of Putin’s regime interfering with French elections with information manipulation.

This a French scientific study showing how the Russian regime tries to influence the political debate in France with Twitter accounts, especially before the last parliamentary elections. The goal is to promote a party that is more favorable to them, namely, the far right. hal.science/…/Chavalarias_23h50_Putin_s_Clock.pdf

In France, we have a concept called the “Republican front” that is kind of tacit agreement between almost all parties, left, center and right, to work together to prevent far-right from reaching power and threaten the values of the French Republic. This front has been weakening at every election, with the far right rising and lately some of the traditional right joining them. But it still worked out at the last one, far right was given first by the polls, but thanks to the front, they eventually ended up 3rd.

What this article says, is that the Russian regime has been working for years to invert this front and push most parties to consider that it is part of the left that is against the Republic values, more than the far right. One of their most cynical tactic is using videos from the Gaza war to traumatize leftists until they say something that may sound antisemitic. Then they repost those words and push the agenda that the left is antisemitic and therefore against the Republican values.

Hello_there ,

Yeah, but once you charge a CC# you can ban that number in the future. It's not perfect but you can raise the hurdle a bit.

farcaster ,

Keep Lemmy small. Make the influence of conversation here uninteresting.

I’m doing my part!

antmzo220 ,

Or … bite the bullet and carry out one-time id checks via a $1 charge.

Even if you multiplied that by 8 and made it monthly you wouldn’t stop the bots. There’s tons of “verified” bots on twitter.

tal ,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

Keep Lemmy small. Make the influence of conversation here uninteresting.

That’s a significant constraint and it’s probably possible to reuse a lot of the costs in developing a both for another platform.

Or … bite the bullet and carry out one-time id checks via a $1 charge.

Yeah, making identities expensive helps. But…you note that the bot that OP posted clearly had the bot operator pay for a blue checkmark there. So it wasn’t enough in that case.

thehatfox ,
@thehatfox@lemmy.world avatar

Creating a cost barrier to participation is possibly one of the better ways to deter bot activity.

Charging money to register or even post on a platform is one method. There are administrative and ethical challenges to overcome though, especially for non-commercial platforms like Lemmy.

CAPTCHA systems are another, which costs human labour to solve a puzzle before gaining access.

There had been some attempts to use proof of work based systems to combat email spam in the past, which puts a computing resource cost in place. Crypto might have poisoned the well on that one though.

All of these are still vulnerable to state level actors though, who have large pools of financial, human, and machine resources to spend on manipulation.

Maybe instead the best way to protect communities from such attacks is just to remain small and insignificant enough to not attract attention in the first place.

DandomRude ,
@DandomRude@lemmy.world avatar

I think the only way to solve this problem for good would be to tie social media accounts to proof of identity. However, apart from what would certainly be a difficult technical implementation, this would create a whole bunch of different problems. The benefits would probably not outweigh the costs.

otter ,

1. The platform needs an incentive to get rid of bots.

Bots on Reddit pump out an advertiser friendly firehose of “content” that they can pretend is real to their investors, while keeping people scrolling longer. On Fediverse platforms there isn’t a need for profit or growth. Low quality spam just becomes added server load we need to pay for.

I’ve mentioned it before, but we ban bots very fast here. People report them fast and we remove them fast. Searching the same scam link on Reddit brought up accounts that have been posting the same garbage for months.

Twitter and Reddit benefit from bot activity, and don’t have an incentive to stop it.

2. We need tools to detect the bots so we can remove them.

Public vote counts should help a lot towards catching manipulation on the fediverse. Any action that can affect visibility (upvotes and comments) can be pulled by researchers through federation to study/catch inorganic behavior.

Since the platforms are open source, instances could even set up tools that look for patterns locally, before it gets out.

It’ll be an arm’s race, but it wouldn’t be impossible.

TriflingToad ,

interesting. Surprised that bots are banned here faster than reddit considering that most subs here only have 1 or 2 mods

wjs018 ,

There is a lot of collaboration between the different instance admins in this regard. The lemmy.world admins have a matrix room that is chock full of other instance admins where they share bots that they find to help do things like find similar posters and set up filters to block things like spammy urls. The nice thing about it all is that I am not an admin, but because it is a public room, anybody can sit in there and see the discussion in real time. Compare that to corporate social media like reddit or facebook where there is zero transparency.

SamuelRJankis ,

Public vote counts should help a lot towards catching manipulation on the fediverse. Any action that can affect visibility (upvotes and comments) can be pulled by researchers through federation to study/catch inorganic behavior.

I’d love to see some type of Adblock like crowd sourced block lists. If the growth of other platforms is any indication there will probably be a day where it would be nice to block out a large amounts of accounts. I’d even pay for it.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • [email protected]
  • random
  • lifeLocal
  • goranko
  • All magazines
    •