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??
You were targeted by someone and they used the bots to punish you. It could have been a keyword in your posts. I had some tool that would down vote any post where I used the word snowflake. I guess the little snowflake didn't like me calling him one. I played around with bots for a while but it wasn't worth it. I was a OP on several IRC networks back in the day and the bots we ran then actually did something useful. Like a small percentage of reddit bots.
I doubt that. 15 downvotes for saying they like WoW doesn't seem that out of line. People hate the crap out of that game and its users. Bots are a huge problem, but I doubt they are targeting OP.