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??
Internet is not a place for public discourse, it never was. it's the game of numbers where people brigade discussions and make it confirm to their biases.
Post something bad about the US with facts and statistics in US centric reddit sub, youtube video or article, and see how it divulges into brigading, name calling and racism. Do that on lemmy.ml to call out china/russia. Go to youtube videos with anything critical about India.
For all countries with massive population on the internet, you're going to get bombarded with lies, delfection, whataboutism and strawman. Add in a few bots and you shape the narrative.
There's also burying bad press with literally downvoting and never interacting.
Both are easy on the internet when you've got the brainwashed gullible mass to steer the narrative.
Just because you can't change minds by walking into the centers of people's bubbles and trying to shout logic at the people there, doesn't mean the genuine exchange of ideas at the intersecting outer edges of different groups aren't real or important.
Entrenched opinions are nearly impossibly to alter in discussion, you can't force people to change their minds, to see reality for what it is even if they refuse. They have to be willing to actually listen, first.
And people can and do grow disillusioned, at which point they will move away from their bubbles of their own accord, and go looking for real discourse.
At that point it's important for reasonable discussion that stands up to scrutiny to exist for them to find.
And it does.
I agree. Whenever I get into an argument online, it's usually with the understanding that it exists for the benefit of the people who may spectate the argument — I'm rarely aiming to change the mind of the person I'm conversing with. Especially when it's not even a discussion, but a more straightforward calling someone out for something, that's for the benefit of other people in the comments, because some sentiments cannot go unchanged.
Did you mean unchallenged? Either way I agree, when I encounter people who believe things that are provably untrue, their views should be changed.
It's not always possible, but even then, challenging those ideas and putting the counterarguments right next to the insanity, inoculates or at least reduces the chance that other readers might take what the deranged have to say seriously.
Well, unfortunately, the internet and especially social media is still the main source of information for more and more people, if not the only one. For many, it is also the only place where public discourse takes place, even if you can hardly call it that. I guess we are probably screwed.