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??
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.