Given the state of technology, politics, and social media, we all share fears about interacting with bots, or having our social media manipulated. We know that this is happening on other platforms that are driven by engagement/profit models. However, Lemmy is about people – like you! While this platform is not immune to bots, we have several layers of protections in place to remove bots and trolls as quickly as possible.
Some of these operations are performed automatically at a server level, and you likely never see them at all. Some rely on the reporting system and the common sense of our userbase – that’s you again! If you believe that another user is a bot, please report it and our mod team will investigate. Please keep in mind that real people really do have radically different points of view. Not everyone who disagrees with you is a bot or troll. Do not abuse the report system.
We encourage the expression and discussion of different points of view, as long as the discussion is civil and in good faith. It is not a civil form of disagreement to call another user a bot or paid actor in posts or comments. It is a personal attack, which is a violation of our first rule. We have updated the language of the rule in our sidebar to reflect this. Our first priority is for the safety of our users to express their ideas. Thanks!
- Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
I’m glad to see this going in. Rampant bot and Russian accusations are poison to online discourse, let alone that Lemmy is such an irrelevant target I’m not sure the GRU even know it exists. That’s not to say I’d put it past individuals here to sockpuppet or build downvote bots, but that’s not something a regular poster has enough information to figure out and for every correct accusation there will be dozens or hundreds of false accusations destroying the purpose of a message board.
while I agree in general with the sentiment, there are bots/whatevers here. not nearly as manny as on, say, twitter or reddit, or face book, but they’re here. you can see the most-obvious ones as they drop advertisements for random stuff in places like ‘news’ and ‘world news’ Mods are very good at yeeting those quickly.
There was even one marketer that created their own instance of lemmy to flood the fediverse with. though I think that got defederated pretty quickly.
again, you’re absolutely right that the accusations are going to be mostly wrong.
I have a one word edit I would like to make to this comment