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??
So, making identities expensive helps. It'd probably filter out some. But, look at the bot in OP's image. The bot's operator clearly paid for a blue checkmark. That's (checks) $8/mo, so the operator paid at least $8, and it clearly wasn't enough to deter them. In fact, they chose the blue checkmark because the additional credibility was worth it; X doesn't mandate that they get one.
And it also will deter humans. I don't personally really care about the $10 because I like this environment, but creating that kind of up-front barrier is going to make a lot of people not try a system. And a lot of times financial transactions come with privacy issues, because a lot of governments get really twitchy about money-laundering via anonymous transactions.
Yep, exactly this. It might deter some small time bot creators, but it won't stop larger operations and may even help them to seem more legitimate.
If anything, my favorite idea comes from this xkcd: