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PSA: Lemmy votes can be manipulated (feddit.nl)

submitted 1 year ago by koper@feddit.nl to c/fediverse@lemmy.ml

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The best part of the fediverse is that anyone can run their own server. The downside of this is that anyone can easily create hordes of fake accounts, as I will now demonstrate.

Fighting fake accounts is hard and most implementations do not currently have an effective way of filtering out fake accounts. I'm sure that the developers will step in if this becomes a bigger problem. Until then, remember that votes are just a number.

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[-] PetrichorBias@lemmy.one 376 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

This was a problem on reddit too. Anyone could create accounts - heck, I had 8 accounts:

one main, one alt, one "professional" (linked publicly on my website), and five for my bots (whose accounts were optimistically created, but were never properly run). I had all 8 accounts signed in on my third-party app and I could easily manipulate votes on the posts I posted.

I feel like this is what happened when you'd see posts with hundreds / thousands of upvotes but had only 20-ish comments.

There needs to be a better way to solve this, but I'm unsure if we truly can solve this. Botnets are a problem across all social media (my undergrad thesis many years ago was detecting botnets on Reddit using Graph Neural Networks).

Fwiw, I have only one Lemmy account.

[-] BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world 26 points 1 year ago

Yes, I feel like this is a moot point. If you want it to be "one human, one vote" then you need to use some form of government login (like id.me, which I've never gotten to work). Otherwise people will make alts and inflate/deflate the "real" count. I'm less concerned about "accurate points" and more concerned about stability, participation, and making this platform as inclusive as possible.

[-] PetrichorBias@lemmy.one 21 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

In my opinion, the biggest (and quite possibly most dangerous) problem is someone artificially pumping up their ideas. To all the users who sort by active / hot, this would be quite problematic.

I'd love to actually see some social media research groups actually consider how to detect and potentially eliminate this issue on Lemmy, considering Lemmy is quite new and is malleable at this point (compared to other social media). For example, if they think metric X may be a good idea to include in all metadata to increase chances of detection, then it may be possible to include this in the source code of posts / comments / activities.

I know a few professors and researchers who do research on social media and associated technologies, I'll go talk to them when they come to their office on Monday.