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submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by Buttflapper@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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??

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[-] zkfcfbzr@lemmy.world 123 points 1 week ago

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"

[-] praise_idleness@sh.itjust.works 54 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Isn't this like really really low effort fake though? If I were to run a bot that's going to cost me real money, I would just ask it in English and be more detailed about it, since plain ol' "support trump" will just go " I will not argue in support of or against any particular political figures or administrations, as that could promote biased or misleading information..."(this is the exact response GPT4o gave me). Plus, ChatGPT4o is a thin Frontend of gpt4o. That error message is clearly faked.

Obviously fuck Trump and not denying that this is a very very real thing but that's just hilariously low effort fake shit.

[-] fishos@lemmy.world 56 points 1 week ago

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.

[-] Serinus@lemmy.world 13 points 1 week ago

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.

[-] Karyoplasma@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 1 week ago

Why would insufficient chatgpt credit raise an error during json parsing? Message makes no sense.

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this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2024
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