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??

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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