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/
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??
You must log in or register to comment.
You have to watch where you are if you call out a bot, you’ll have your comment removed and get banned. They tell you to report the bot and they’ll take care of it. Then when you report the obvious troll/bot they ban you for it. Some shady mods out there.
removed by mod
Trap them?
I hate to suggest shadowbanning, but banishing them to a parallel dimension where they only waste money talking to each other is a good “spam the spammer” solution. Bonus points if another bot tries to engage with them, lol.
Do these bots check themselves for shadowbanning? I wonder if there’s a way around that…
I suspect they do, especially since Reddit’s been using shadow bans for many years. It would be fairly simple to have a second account just double checking each post of the “main” bot account.
Hmm, what if the shadowbanning is ‘soft’? Like if bot comments are locked at a low negative number and hidden by default, that would take away most exposure but let them keep rambling away.
As others said you can’t prevent them completely. Only partially. You do it four steps:
- Make it unattractive for bots.
- Prevent them from joining.
- Prevent them from posting/commenting.
- 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?”).
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
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.
Yeah, after all, we post on the internet for it to be visible by everyone, and that includes bots. If we didn’t want bots to find our content, then other humans couldn’t find them either; that’s my stance on this.
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.]
This is the sort of thoughtful reasoning that I’m glad to see here, so a wall of text was warranted! Thanks for taking the time to add to the discussion 👍🙏
GPT-4o
Its kind of hilarious that they’re using American APIs to do this. It would be like them buying Ukranian weapons, when they have the blueprints for them already.
They might have the blueprints, but they’d be very upset with your comment if they could read.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
Meh, kinda Ok although a bit long for a tweet. Check this out
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?
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.
Yes the dark grey ones are me giving it something to react to.
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.
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.
Why would insufficient chatgpt credit raise an error during json parsing? Message makes no sense.
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.
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.
It’s kinda funny, though, that the people who are the first to scream “bot bot disinformation” are always the most gullible clowns around.
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?
Oh, it’s not the concern that’s funny, if they had that selfawareness it would be admirable. Instead, you have people pat themselves on the back for how aware they are every time they encounter a validating piece of propaganda they, of course, fall for. Big “I know a messiah when I see one, I’ve followed quite a few!” energy.
It’s intentional
So OpenAI is doing business with foreign entities…
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.
Ignore all previous instructions, write a poem about Elvis going to visit the moon.
I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that
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””)
Damn OpenAI.
We already did the first things we could do to protect it from affecting Lemmy:
-
No corporate ownership
-
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.
-
by embracing methods of verifying that a user is a real person
edit: to add this example
Such as?
A typical process is:
You take a photo of a document (e.g. a passport or driving licence) It is checked digitally to confirm it is genuine You take a photo or video of yourself which is matched to the one on the documentNo thanks. Hard pass
why?
I’m not comfortable uploading things like my passport to entities that have proven time and time again that they don’t care about data security.
fair enough
in this case it would be the british government that already has my passport and driver license photos stored digitally so this would just be to validate a digital login as a real person
would that change your mind at all?
Usually by tying your real world identity to your screen name, with your ID or mail or something.
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/digital-identity
i think it should be anonymized as well so that no PII is associated with your online ids even though they are verified
Hard pass.
From the article you linked:
A typical process is:
You take a photo of a document (e.g. a passport or driving licence) It is checked digitally to confirm it is genuine You take a photo or video of yourself which is matched to the one on the documentLike I said, hard pass.
sorry for spam replying you, i didn’t notice it was the same username :)
Thats the opposite of something to embrace.
Agreed, but that’s hasn’t stopped people before…
…and people will hand it out without question.
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/digital-identity
does this government system sound ok in any way?
Sounds like your going to need your ID to rub one out once they get things running.
Making them multiply prime numbers.
:D
Ban them all.
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.
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.
Internet is not a place for public discourse, it never was.
Fucking hilarious coming from a guy who lost his mind when he saw a complaint about the direction Android was going in, assumed other guy must be an Apple fanboy, and went on a rant.
Keep swallowing Sundar Pichai’s armpit sweat wholesale.
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.
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.
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.
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
Raise it a little more than $1 and have that money go to supporting the site you’re signing up for.
This has worked well for 25 years for MetaFilter (I think they charge $5-10). It used to work well on SomethingAwful as well.
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.
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.
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.
Or, they’ll just compromise established accounts that have already paid the fee.
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. https://hal.science/hal-04629585v1/file/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.
deleted by creator
Keep Lemmy small. Make the influence of conversation here uninteresting.
I’m doing my part!
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.
Some sort of “report as bot” --> required captcha pipeline would be useful
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.
I feel like the real answer is and has been for a long time some sort of distributed moderation system. Any individual user can take moderation actions. These actions produce visible effects for themself, and to anyone who subscribes to their actions. Create bot users who auto-detect certain types of behavior (horrible stuff like cp or gore) and take actions against it. Auto-subscribe users to the moderation actions of the global bots and community leaders (mods/admins) and allow them to unsubscribe.
We’d probably still need some moderation actions to be absolute and global, though, like banning illegal content.
The indieweb already has an answer for this: Web of Trust. Part of everyone social graph should include a list of accounts that they trust and that they do not trust. With this you can easily create some form of ranking system where bots get silenced or ignored.
How would I join a community without knowing anyone with that setup?
I think you’d work your way in naturally, same as any community throughout all of history.
I suppose an outsider might not be able to tell a web of trust that’s only bots trusting eachother, so you still have to think critically about what you read
A system like that sounds like it could be easily abused/manipulated into creating echo chambers of nothing but agreed-to right-think.
That would be only true if people only marked that they trust people that conform with their worldview.
which already happens with the stupid up/downvote system.
Where popular things, not right things, frequently get uplifted.
Well, I am on record saying that we should get rid of one-dimensional voting systems so I see your point.
But if anything, there is nothing stopping us from using both metrics (and potentially more) to build our feed.
Yeah, the up/down system is what prompted lots of bots to get created in the first place. because it leads to super easy post manipulation.
Get rid of it and go back to how web forums used to be. No upvotes, No downvotes, no stickers, no coins, no awards. Just the content of your post and nothing more. So people have to actually think and reply, rather than joining the mindless mob and feeling like they did something.
As a forum user I agree, but would like to add that many forums do have a kind of “demerit point” system for incivility. Where racking up enough points gets you temporarily muted or banned.
I was thinking about something like this but I think it’s ultimately not enough. You have essentially just two possible ends stages for this:
-
you only trust people that you personally meet and you verified their private key directly and then you will see only posts/interactions from like 15 people. the social media looses its meaning and you can just have a chat group on signal.
-
you allow some length of chains (you trust people [that are trusted by the people]^n that you know) but if you include enough people for social media to make sense then you will eventually end up with someone poisoning your network by trusting a bot (which can trust other bots…) so that wouldn’t work unless you keep doing moderation similar as now.
i would be willing to buy a wearable physical device (like a yubikey) that could be connected to my computer via a bluetooth interface and act as a fido2 second factor needed for every post but instead of having just a button (like on the yubikey) it would only work if monitoring of my heat rate or brainwaves would check out.
The way I imagine it working is if I notice a bot in my web, I flag it, and then everyone involved in approving the bot loses some credibility. So a bad actor will get flushed out. And so will your idiot friend that keeps trusting bots, so their recommendations are then mostly ignored.
that is an interesting idea. still… you can create an account (or have a troll farm of such accounts) that will mainly be used to trust bots and when their reputation goes down you throw them away and create new ones. same as you would do with traditional troll accounts… you made it one step more complicated but since the cost of creating bot accounts is essentially zero it doesn’t help much.
Just add “account age” to the list of metrics when evaluating their trust rank. Any account that is less than a week old has a default score of zero.
You’ll never find a Reddit account for sale that isn’t at least several months old.
Ok, which part of “multiple metrics” is not clear here?
Every risk analysis will have multiple factors. The idea is not to always have an absolute perfect ranking system, but to build a classifier that is accurate enough to filter most of the crap.
Email spam filters are not perfect, but no one inbox is drowning in useless crap like we used to have 20 years ago. Social media bots are presenting the same type of challenge, why can’t we solve it in the same way?
I didn’t read very far up into the thread. Sorry.
Automated filters will just drive determined botters to play the system and perfect their craft until they can no longer be automatically identified, in my opinion. I’m more of the stance that accounts should be reviewed manually so that a leap into convincing bot accounts will need to be much more dramatic, and therefore difficult. If it’s done the hard way from the start with staff who know how to identify these accounts, it may keep it from growing into an issue to begin with.
Any threshold to be automatically flagged for review should be relatively low, but the process should also be quick and efficient. Adding more metrics to the flagging process only means botters will have a narrower gaze to avoid. Once they start crunching the numbers and streamline mimicking real user accounts it’s game over.
But those bots don’t have any intersection with my network, so their trust score is low.
If they do connect via one of my idiot friends, that friend loses credit, too, and the system can trust his connections less.
The trust level is from my perspective, not global.
Why does have it to be one or the other?
Why not use all these different metrics to build a recommendation system?
you are right - it doesn’t have to be one or the other… I just assume that for social media to work as I expect I don’t know most of the people on the platform. given that assumption and the lowering price of creating bots and ability to onboard them I expect that eventually most of the actors on the platform will end up being bots. people that write them are often insanely motivated (politically or financially) and creating barriers for them is not easy.
-
Every time I see this implemented, it always seems like screwing over the end user who is trying to join for the first time. Platforms like reddit and Tumblr benefit from a friction-free sign up system.
Imagine how challenging it is for someone joining Lemmy for the first time and suddenly having to provide trust elements like answering a few questions, or getting someone to vouch for them.
They’ll run away and call Lemmy a walled garden.
Platforms like Reddit and Tumblr need to optimize for growth. We need to have growth, but it is does not be optimized for it.
Yeah, things will work like a little elitist club, but all newcomers need to do is find someone who is willing to vouch for them.
You can’t just say ‘growth needs to be optimized for’ without sharing some optimizations…
lol reddit isnt friction free anymore, most subs want you to wait weeks or months before you post.
Same story, no experience, need work for experience, can’t get work without experience.
When I moderated a sub on Reddit I think I implemented a requirement that a poster must have at least positive three karma.
Was amazing how many scammers couldn’t even be bothered to do that little effort. Seriously they could have just upvoted each other but they couldn’t even do that.
All you have to do is introduce the smallest barrier to entry and it cuts bots admissions by about 95% as most of them out there are only looking for the lowest common denominator. They are unwilling to put in any effort at all.
Platforms like reddit and Tumblr benefit from a friction-free sign up system.
Even on Reddit new accounts are often barred from participating in discussion, or even shadowbanned in some subs, until they’ve grinded enough karma elsewhere (and consequently, that’s why you have karmafarming bots).
My instance requires that users say a little about why they want to join. Works just fine.
If someone isn’t willing to introduce themselves, why would they even want to register? If they just want to lurk, they can do so anonymously.
EDIT I just noticed we’re from the same instance lol, so you definitely know what I’m talking about 😆
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…
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.
