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??
This is another reason why a lack of transparency with user votes is bad.
As to why it is seemingly done randomly in reddit, it is to decrease your global karma score to make you less influential and to discourage you from making new comments. You probably pissed off someone's troll farm in what they considered an influential subreddit. It might also interest you that reddit was explicitly named as part of a Russian influence effort here: https://www.justice.gov/opa/media/1366201/dl - maybe some day we will see something similar for other obvious troll farms operating in Reddit.