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??
Bots are like microplastics. No place on Earth is free from them anymore.
They're in our blood and even in our brain?
Literally yes.
https://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.
Username checks out
You are bot
When you fail the Captcha test... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UymlSE7ax1o
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.
They’re even in my balls.