i mean bots literally make the most of the posts and comments that goes on r/all everytime. if you check the user of a popular post on reddit its most likely to be a bot.

Which wikipedia article? Check the references of that article. That’s your answer.

And just like that, I had an attack of perspective. Why am I in this conversation? Everyone watching seems to understand that you’re changing your story and talking nonsense, so it seems unnecessary for me to say anything else for their sake. And it seems highly unlikely that, on your side, you’re going to suddenly come to some kind of realization along the lines of, “You know what? Reality does have an anti-Russian bias, and quite a strong one, so it makes perfect sense that a source that made an attempt at publishing objective truth would be against Russia in terms of the ‘bias’ of a lot of the facts that it publishes. As well as being against Israel, NATO, or ‘the West’ in general, when those governments in turn do terrible things. I think I should spend less time carrying water for genocidal maniacs who happen to wear the right color hat, and start being reasonable.”

So I hope your talking points go really well. You’ve said that Wikipedia is terrible. Well done! Mission accomplished. Feel free to continue, I won’t stop you.

the article you’re talking about reads like a case of “our holy narrative-correcting taskforce vs their pagan misinformation agents”

[bad actors] put in the effort to build reputation…, mixing legitimate page edits with the more politically sensitive ones

through subtle changes like casting doubt on the objectivity of pro-Western accounts

they also mention adding links from Russian state-owned news, but the article doesn’t indicate that those things happen in the same incidents though mentioning it in the same sentence is certainly an attempt to conflate them. It’s one thing to remove insufficiently reliable sources, correcting misrepresented facts, and banning the wreckers that consistently produce it, but I think there is an issue if validly-sourced edits are being censored by “bias adjusters” (NPOV purposes withstanding) just because the content is deemed to have been written by a suspected bad actor.

yes of course there are many different data points you can use. along with complex math you can also feed a lot of these data points in machine learning models and get useful systems that can perhaps red flag certain accounts and then have processes with more scrutiny that require more resources (such as a human reviewing)

websites like chess.com do similar things to find cheaters. and they (along with lichess) have put out some interesting material going over some of what their process looks like

here i have two things. one is that lichess, which is mostly developed and maintained by a single individual, is able to maintain an effective anti-cheat system. so I don’t think it’s impossible that lemmy is able to accomplish these types of heuristics and behavioral tracking

the second thing is that these new AIs are really good. it’s not just the text, but the items you mentioned. for example I train a machine learning model and then a separate LLM on all of reddit’s history. the first model is meant to try and emulate all of the “normal” human flags. make it so it posts at hours that would match the trends. vary the sentiments in a natural way. etc. post at not random intervals of time but intervals of time that looks like a natural distribution, etc. the model will find patterns that we can’t imagine and use those to blend in

so you not only spread the content you want (whether it’s subtle product promotion or nation-state propaganda) but you have a separate model trained to disguise that text as something real

that’s the issue it’s not just the text but if you really want to do this right (and people with $$$ have that incentive) as of right now it’s virtually impossible to prevent a motivated actor from doing this. and we are starting to see this with lichess and chess.com.

the next generation of cheaters aren’t just using chess engines like Stockfish, but AIs trained to play like humans. it’s becoming increasingly difficult.

the only reason it hasn’t completely taken over the platform is because it’s expensive. you need a lot of computing power to do this effectively. and most people don’t have the resources or the technical ability to make this happen.

$20 for a chatgpt pro account and fractions of pennies to run a bot server. It’s really extremely cheap to do this.

openAI has checks for this type of thing. They limit number of requests per hour with the regular $20 subscription

you’d have to use the API and that comes at a cost per request, depending on which model you are using. it can get expensive very quickly depending on what scale of bot manipulation you are going for

Here’s another good summary: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer

did you reply to the wrong thing? or you specialize in bad jokes that are impossible for anyone to think funny?