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??

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

AmidFuror ,

One argument in favor of bots on social media is their ability to automate routine tasks and provide instant responses. For example, bots can handle customer service inquiries, offer real-time updates, and manage repetitive interactions, which can enhance user experience and free up human moderators for more complex tasks. Additionally, they can help in disseminating important information quickly and efficiently, especially in emergency situations or for public awareness campaigns.

greengear5 ,

This reads like a chatgpt reply 😅

PenisDuckCuck9001 ,

deleted_by_author

    •
    catloaf ,

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

    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.

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