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've been thinking postcard based account validation for online services might be a strategy to fight bots.
As in, rather than an email address, you register with a physical address and get mailed a post card.
A server operator would then have to approve mailing 1,000 post cards to whatever address the bot operator was working out of. The cost of starting and maintaining a bot farm skyrockets as a result (you not only have to pay to get the postcard, you have to maintain a physical presence somewhere ... and potentially a lot of them if you get banned/caught with any frequency).
Similarly, most operators would presumably only mail to folks within their nation's mail system. So if Russia wanted to create a bunch of US accounts on "mainstream" US hosted services, they'd have to physically put agents inside of the United States that are receiving these postcards ... and now the FBI can treat this like any other organized domestic crime syndicate.
I was thinking physical mail too. But I think It definitely would require some sort of system that is either third party or government backed that annonomyses you like how the covid Bluetooth tracing system worked (stupidly called track and trace in the UK). Plus you'd have to interact with someone at a postal office to legitimise it. But I'm talking, just a worker at a counter.
So you'd get a one time unique annonomysed postal address. You go to a post office and hand your letter over to someone. You, and perhaps they, will not know the address, but the system will. Maybe a process which re-envelopes the letter down the line into a letter with the real address on.
This way, you've kept the server owner private and you've had to involve some form of person to person interaction meaning, not a bot!
This system could be used for all sorts of verification other than for socal media so may have enough incentive for governments/3rd partys to set up to use beyond that.
Could it be abused though and if how are there solutions to mitigate them?