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??
I think the larger problem is that we are now trying to be non-controversal to avoid downvotes.
Who thinks it's a good idea to self censor on social media? Because that's what you are doing, because of the downvote system.
I will never agree downvotes are a net positive. They create censorship and allows the ignorant mob or bots to push down things they don't like reading.
Bots make it worse of course, since they can just downvote whatever they are programmed to downvote, and upvote things that they want to be visible. Basically it's like having an army of minions to manipulate entire platforms.
All because of downvotes and upvotes. Of course there should be a way to express that you agree or disagree but should that affect visibility directly? I don't think so.
A few things.
Admins can and do ban accounts that downvote rampantly
Obvious bot brigading is obvious. It became harder to tell on reddit when they started fuzzing the vote numbers, but could frequently still be figured out. It's easier on Lemmy, someone just has to report some unusual voting pattern to the admin and they can check if the voting accounts look like bots.
I was once told that the algorithm is less weighted towards upvoted comments and more weighted towards recent comments on Lemmy, when compared with reddit. I am not sure if this is true, but I have noticed that recent comments tend to rise above the top upvoted comments in threads when viewing by Hot.
Without any way for bad content to be filtered out, you just end up with an endless stream of undifferentiated noise. The voting system actually protects the platform from the encroachment of bots and the ignorant mob, because it helps filter them out from the users who have something of value that they want to contribute.
For example, imagine a post where three users comment:
One posts a heated stream of idiocy, falsehoods, and outright nastiness, thinly veiled bigotry and other garbage. Paragraphs of it, all poorly written.
Another is some basic comment not saying anything of any real consequence. Completely mundane to the point no one has upvoted it, but it is perfectly harmless.
The final is a comment with some meat on it and something to add to the conversation, but unfortunately they arrived too late to the thread. No one saw it, so no one upvoted it.
Without downvotes, all three of these comments are treated exactly the same.
I get downvotes can suck sometimes but they're a valuable aspect to this system and removing them does not make the place better.
I'd argue what people need to do if these things are genuinely bothering them is turn off the scores entirely and learn to live without them. It's better for your mental health.