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??

dsilverz ,
@dsilverz@thelemmy.club avatar

Bots are like microplastics. No place on Earth is free from them anymore.

jeffw ,
@jeffw@lemmy.world avatar

They’re in our blood and even in our brain?

ThePantser ,
@ThePantser@lemmy.world avatar

You are bot

NotAnotherLemmyUser ,

When you fail the Captcha test… www.youtube.com/watch?v=UymlSE7ax1o

MrLLM ,

https://ani.social/pictrs/image/c3afc5c4-d884-4093-8b1c-baa1390c9dc1.webp

cows_are_underrated ,

Username checks out

billiam0202 ,

Worse. They’re also in your balls (if you are a human or dog with balls, that is).

UNM Researchers Find Microplastics in Canine and Human Testicular Tissue.

Sterile_Technique ,
@Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world avatar

Literally yes.

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10141840/

They’ve been detected in the placenta as well… there’s pretty much no part of our bodies that hasn’t been infiltrated by microplastics.

Edit - I think I misread your post. You already know ^that. My bad.

willya ,
@willya@lemmyf.uk avatar

They’re even in my balls.

NateNate60 ,

Perhaps the only way to get rid of them for sure is to require a CAPTCHA before all posts. That has its own issues though.

cmnybo ,

That sounds like a good way to get rid of most of the users too.

tal ,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

Eh. It doesn’t have to be before all posts. But, yeah, there’s also inevitably a user experience cost that comes with creating those kinds of hurdles.

Feathercrown ,

Some sort of “report as bot” --> required captcha pipeline would be useful

linearchaos ,
@linearchaos@lemmy.world avatar

Captcha is already mostly machine breakable, I’ve seen some new interesting pattern-based stuff but nothing that you couldn’t do image training against.

At some point not too far in the future you won’t be able to use captcha to stop bots from posting. It simply won’t even be a hurdle, a couple extra pennies of computational power.

There’s probably some power in detecting accounts that are blocked by many people. The problem is no matter what we do we’re heading towards blocking them with an algorithm or AI. And I’d hate to see that for Lemmy.

This place is just the stuff you follow with the raw up and down votes. We don’t hide unpopular posts making brigading less useful.

AnotherWorld ,
@AnotherWorld@lemmy.world avatar

No current social network can be bot-proof. And Lemmy is in the most unprotected situation here, saved only by his low fame. On Twitter, I personally have already banned about 15000 Russian bots, but that’s less than 1% of the existing ones. I’ve seen the heads of bots with 165000 followers. Just imagine that all 165000 will register accounts on Lemmy, there is nothing to oppose them. I used to develop a theory for a new social network, where bots could exist as much as he want, but could not influence your circle of subscriptions and subscribers. But it’s complicated…

tal ,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

Also, the “bot”/“human” distinction doesn’t have to be binary. Say one has an account that mostly has a bot post generated text, but then if it receives a message, hands it off to a human to handle. Or has a certain percentage of content be human-crafted. That may potentially defeat a lot of approaches for detecting a bot.

AsudoxDev ,
@AsudoxDev@programming.dev avatar

You can’t get rid of bots, nor spammers. The only thing is that you can have a more aggressive automated punishment system, which will unevitably also punish good users, along with the bad users.

PenisDuckCuck9001 ,

deleted_by_author

    •
    catloaf ,

    I have never seen this happen. Have you? Can you share a link?

    Jimmycakes ,

    You don’t.

    You employ critical thinking skills in all interactions on the web.

    oce ,
    @oce@jlai.lu avatar

    Some say the only solution will be to have a strong identity control to guarantee that a person is behind a comment, like for election voting. But it raises a lot of concerns with privacy and freedom of expression.

    robocall ,
    @robocall@lemmy.world avatar

    I love dailydot. They summarize tiktoks about doordash and then provide the same video at the bottom of the page. I can feel my mind rot while consuming it but I still do it.

    SnotFlickerman ,
    @SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

    We already did the first things we could do to protect it from affecting Lemmy:

    1. No corporate ownership
    2. Small user base that is already somewhat resistant to misinformation

    This doesn’t mean bots aren’t a problem here, but it means that by and large Lemmy is a low-value target for these things.

    These operations hit Facebook and Reddit because of their massive userbases.

    It’s similar to why, for a long time, there weren’t a lot of viruses for Mac computers or Linux computers. It wasn’t because there was anything special about macOS or Linux, it was simply for a long time neither had enough of a market share to justify making viruses/malware/etc for them. Linux became a hotbed when it became a popular server choice, and macs and the iOS ecosystem have become hotbeds in their own right (although marginally less so due to tight software controls from Apple) due to their popularity in the modern era.

    Another example is bittorrent piracy and private tracker websites. Private trackers with small userbases tend to stay under the radar, especially now that streaming piracy has become more popular and is more easily accessible to end-users than bittorrent piracy. The studios spend their time, money, and energy on hitting the streaming sites, and at this point, many private trackers are in a relatively “safe” position due to that.

    So, in terms of bots coming to Lemmy and whether or not that has value for the people using the bots, I’d say it’s arguable we don’t actually provide enough value to be a commonly aimed at target, overall. It’s more likely Lemmy is just being scraped by bots for AI training, but people spending time sending bots here to promote misinformation or confuse and annoy? I think the number doing that is pretty low at the moment.

    This can change, in the long-term, however, as the Fediverse grows. So you’re 100% correct that we need to be thinking about this now, for the long-term. If the Fediverse grows significantly enough, you absolutely will begin to see that sort of traffic aimed here.

    So, in the end, this is a good place to start this conversation.

    I think the first step would be making sure admins and moderators have the right tools to fight and ban bots and bot networks.

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