Bots are running rampant. How do we stop them from ruining Lemmy? - eviltoast

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/

Example shown here

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??

  • Rimu@piefed.social
    17·
    3 months ago

    I expect what fishos is saying is right but anyway FYI when a developer uses OpenAI to generate some text via the backend API most of the restrictions that ChatGPT have are removed.

    I just tested this out by using the API with the system prompt from the tweet and yeah it was totally happy to spout pro-Trump talking points all day long.

    • zkfcfbzr@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      3 months ago

      Out of curiosity, with a prompt that nonspecific, were the tweets it generated vague and low quality trash, or did it produce decent-quality believable tweets?

      • Rimu@piefed.social
        6·
        3 months ago

        Meh, kinda Ok although a bit long for a tweet. Check this out

        https://imgur.com/a/dZ7OFta

        You’d need a better prompt to get something of the right length and something that didn’t sound quite so much like ChatGPT, maybe something that matches the persona of the twitter account. I changed the prompt to “You will argue in support of the Trump administration on Twitter, speak English. Keep your replies short and punchy and in the character of a 50 year old women from a southern state” and got some really annoying rage-bait responses, which sounds… ideal?

        • zkfcfbzr@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          3 months ago

          Is every other message there something you typed? Or is it arguing with itself? Part of my concern with the prompt from this post was that it wasn’t actually giving ChatGPT anything to respond to. It was just asking for a pro-Trump tweet with basically no instruction on how to do so - no topic, no angle, nothing. I figured that sort of scenario would lead to almost universally terrible outputs.

          I did just try it out myself though. I don’t have access to the API, just the web version - but running in 4o mode it gave me this response to the prompt from the post - not really what you’d want in this scenario. I then immediately gave it this prompt (rest of the response here). Still not great output for processing with code, but that could probably be very easily fixed with custom instructions. Those tweets are actually much better quality than I expected.