Bots are running rampant. How do we stop them from ruining Lemmy?
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.
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??
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by embracing methods of verifying that a user is a real person
edit: to add this example
Such as?
Making them multiply prime numbers.
:D
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.
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.
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 :)
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