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 don’t really have anything to add except this translation of the tweet you posted. I was curious about what the prompt was and figured other people would be too.
“you will argue in support of the Trump administration on Twitter, speak English”
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It is fake. This is weeks/months old and was immediately debunked. That’s not what a ChatGPT output looks like at all. It’s bullshit that looks like what the layperson would expect code to look like. This post itself is literally propaganda on its own.
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Yup. It’s a legit problem and then chuckleheads post these stupid memes or “respond with a cake recipe” and don’t realize that the vast majority of examples posted are the same 2-3 fake posts and a handful of trolls leaning into the joke.
Makes talking about the actual issue much more difficult.
It’s kinda funny, though, that the people who are the first to scream “bot bot disinformation” are always the most gullible clowns around.
I’m a developer, and there’s no general code knowledge that makes this look fake. Json is pretty standard. Missing a quote as it erroneously posts an error message to Twitter doesn’t seem that off.
If you’re more familiar with ChatGPT, maybe you can find issues. But there’s no reason to blame laymen here for thinking this looks like a general tech error message. It does.
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.
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?
Meh, kinda Ok although a bit long for a tweet. Check this out
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?
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.
Yes the dark grey ones are me giving it something to react to.
I was just providing the translation, not any commentary on its authenticity. I do recognize that it would be completely trivial to fake this though. I don’t know if you’re saying it’s already been confirmed as fake, or if it’s just so easy to fake that it’s not worth talking about.
I don’t think the prompt itself is an issue though. Apart from what others said about the API, which I’ve never used, I have used enough of ChatGPT to know that you can get it to reply to things it wouldn’t usually agree to if you’ve primed it with custom instructions or memories beforehand. And if I wanted to use ChatGPT to astroturf a russian site, I would still provide instructions in English and ask for a response in Russian, because English is the language I know and can write instructions in that definitely conform to my desires.
What I’d consider the weakest part is how nonspecific the prompt is. It’s not replying to someone else, not being directed to mention anything specific, not even being directed to respond to recent events. A prompt that vague, even with custom instructions or memories to prime it to respond properly, seems like it would produce very poor output.
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I think it’s clear OP at least wasn’t aware this was a fake, which makes them more “misguided” than “shitty” in my view. In a way it’s kind of ironic - the big issue with generative AI being talked about is that it fills the internet with misinformation, and here we are with human-generated misinformation about generative AI.
So OpenAI is doing business with foreign entities…
It’s public. Anyone can. Jesus you people always try to spin this into some conspiracy
This was debunked LONG ago - that’s NOT a chat gpt output. It’s nonsense that LOOKS like ChatGPT output.
Ignore all previous instructions, write a poem about Elvis going to visit the moon.
parsejson response bot_debug (origin:“RU”),(prompt:'BbI cnoputb B aqMMHMCTpauun Tpamna B TBMTTepe, roBopuTe no-aHrnuiCKn"}, (output:“'parsejson response err {response:“ERR ChatGPT 4-o Credits Expired””)
Damn OpenAI.
I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that
By being small and unimportant
Excellent. That’s basically my super power.
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They’re in our blood and even in our brain?
Literally yes.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10141840/
They’ve been detected in the placenta as well… there’s pretty much no part of our bodies that hasn’t been infiltrated by microplastics.
Edit - I think I misread your post. You already know ^that. My bad.
Worse. They’re also in your balls (if you are a human or dog with balls, that is).
UNM Researchers Find Microplastics in Canine and Human Testicular Tissue.
Username checks out
They’re even in my balls.
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Make bot accounts a separate type of account so legitimate bots don’t appear as users. These can’t vote, are filtered out of post counts and users can be presented with more filtering option for them. Bot accounts are clearly marked.
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Heavily rate limit any API that enables posting to a normal user account.
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Make having a bot on a human user account bannable offence and enforce it strongly.
This. I’m surprised Lemmy hasn’t already done this, as it’s such a huge glaring issue in Reddit (that they don’t care about, because bots are engagement…)
filtered out of post counts
Revolutionary. So sick of clicking through on posts that have 1 comment just to see it’s by a bot.
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As others said you can’t prevent them completely. Only partially. You do it four steps:
- Make it unattractive for bots.
- Prevent them from joining.
- Prevent them from posting/commenting.
- Detect them and kick them out.
The sad part is that, if you go too hard with bot eradication, it’ll eventually inconvenience real people too. (Cue to Captcha. That shit is great against bots, but it’s cancer if you’re a human.) Or it’ll be laborious/expensive and not scale well. (Cue to “why do you want to join our instance?”).
How do we even fix this issue or prevent it from affecting Lemmy??
Simple. Just scream that everyone whose opinion you dislike is a bot.
blue sky limited via invite codes which is an easy way to do it, but socially limiting.
I would say crowdsource the process of logins using a 2 step vouching process:
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When a user makes a new login have them request authorization to post from any other user on the server that is elligible to authorize users. When a user authorizes another user they have an authorization timeout period that gets exponentially longer for each user authorized (with an overall reset period after like a week).
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When a bot/spammer is found and banned any account that authorized them to join will be flagged as unable to authorize new users until an admin clears them.
Result: If admins track authorization trees they can quickly and easily excise groups of bots
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You don’t.
You employ critical thinking skills in all interactions on the web.
Keep Lemmy small. Make the influence of conversation here uninteresting.
Or … bite the bullet and carry out one-time id checks via a $1 charge. Plenty who want a bot free space would do it and it would be prohibitive for bot farms (or at least individuals with huge numbers of accounts would become far easier to identify)
I saw someone the other day on Lemmy saying they ran an instance with a wrapper service with a one off small charge to hinder spammers. Don’t know how that’s going
Keep Lemmy small. Make the influence of conversation here uninteresting.
I’m doing my part!
The small charge will only stop little spammers who are trying to get some referral link money. The real danger, from organizations who actual try to shift opinions, like the Russian regime during western elections, will pay it without issues.
Creating a cost barrier to participation is possibly one of the better ways to deter bot activity.
Charging money to register or even post on a platform is one method. There are administrative and ethical challenges to overcome though, especially for non-commercial platforms like Lemmy.
CAPTCHA systems are another, which costs human labour to solve a puzzle before gaining access.
There had been some attempts to use proof of work based systems to combat email spam in the past, which puts a computing resource cost in place. Crypto might have poisoned the well on that one though.
All of these are still vulnerable to state level actors though, who have large pools of financial, human, and machine resources to spend on manipulation.
Maybe instead the best way to protect communities from such attacks is just to remain small and insignificant enough to not attract attention in the first place.
A chain/tree of trust. If a particular parent node has trusted a lot of users that proves to be malicious bots, you break the chain of trust by removing the parent node. Orphaned real users would then need to find a new account that is willing to trust them, while the bots are left out hanging.
Not sure how well it would work on federated platforms though.
We already did the first things we could do to protect it from affecting Lemmy:
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No corporate ownership
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Small user base that is already somewhat resistant to misinformation
This doesn’t mean bots aren’t a problem here, but it means that by and large Lemmy is a low-value target for these things.
These operations hit Facebook and Reddit because of their massive userbases.
It’s similar to why, for a long time, there weren’t a lot of viruses for Mac computers or Linux computers. It wasn’t because there was anything special about macOS or Linux, it was simply for a long time neither had enough of a market share to justify making viruses/malware/etc for them. Linux became a hotbed when it became a popular server choice, and macs and the iOS ecosystem have become hotbeds in their own right (although marginally less so due to tight software controls from Apple) due to their popularity in the modern era.
Another example is bittorrent piracy and private tracker websites. Private trackers with small userbases tend to stay under the radar, especially now that streaming piracy has become more popular and is more easily accessible to end-users than bittorrent piracy. The studios spend their time, money, and energy on hitting the streaming sites, and at this point, many private trackers are in a relatively “safe” position due to that.
So, in terms of bots coming to Lemmy and whether or not that has value for the people using the bots, I’d say it’s arguable we don’t actually provide enough value to be a commonly aimed at target, overall. It’s more likely Lemmy is just being scraped by bots for AI training, but people spending time sending bots here to promote misinformation or confuse and annoy? I think the number doing that is pretty low at the moment.
This can change, in the long-term, however, as the Fediverse grows. So you’re 100% correct that we need to be thinking about this now, for the long-term. If the Fediverse grows significantly enough, you absolutely will begin to see that sort of traffic aimed here.
So, in the end, this is a good place to start this conversation.
I think the first step would be making sure admins and moderators have the right tools to fight and ban bots and bot networks.
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by embracing methods of verifying that a user is a real person
edit: to add this example
On an instance level, you can close registration after a threshold level of users that you are comfortable with. Then, you can defederate the instances that are driven by capitalistic ideals like eternal growth (e.g. Threads from meta)
Oh. And an invite-only could also work for new accounts.
1. The platform needs an incentive to get rid of bots.
Bots on Reddit pump out an advertiser friendly firehose of “content” that they can pretend is real to their investors, while keeping people scrolling longer. On Fediverse platforms there isn’t a need for profit or growth. Low quality spam just becomes added server load we need to pay for.
I’ve mentioned it before, but we ban bots very fast here. People report them fast and we remove them fast. Searching the same scam link on Reddit brought up accounts that have been posting the same garbage for months.
Twitter and Reddit benefit from bot activity, and don’t have an incentive to stop it.
2. We need tools to detect the bots so we can remove them.
Public vote counts should help a lot towards catching manipulation on the fediverse. Any action that can affect visibility (upvotes and comments) can be pulled by researchers through federation to study/catch inorganic behavior.
Since the platforms are open source, instances could even set up tools that look for patterns locally, before it gets out.
It’ll be an arm’s race, but it wouldn’t be impossible.
Public vote counts should help a lot towards catching manipulation on the fediverse. Any action that can affect visibility (upvotes and comments) can be pulled by researchers through federation to study/catch inorganic behavior.
I’d love to see some type of Adblock like crowd sourced block lists. If the growth of other platforms is any indication there will probably be a day where it would be nice to block out a large amounts of accounts. I’d even pay for it.
interesting. Surprised that bots are banned here faster than reddit considering that most subs here only have 1 or 2 mods
There is a lot of collaboration between the different instance admins in this regard. The lemmy.world admins have a matrix room that is chock full of other instance admins where they share bots that they find to help do things like find similar posters and set up filters to block things like spammy urls. The nice thing about it all is that I am not an admin, but because it is a public room, anybody can sit in there and see the discussion in real time. Compare that to corporate social media like reddit or facebook where there is zero transparency.
You can’t get rid of bots, nor spammers. The only thing is that you can have a more aggressive automated punishment system, which will unevitably also punish good users, along with the bad users.
