Watching some videos on YouTube about protests in my region and I have a suspicion these comment sections are just filled with fake people.
I believe something as simple as moderated user registration along with their automated filtering goes a long way to combat this. The automated filtering can help remove the spam by recognizing forms filled with random bullshit, or detect input that has been copy pasted multiple times from other registrations, and a human moderator can then have a more manageable amount of registrations to go through and manually accept.
This as well as the email confirmation after the acceptance should already be a big obstacle for massive bot farms. It’s still very much possible for all those agencies that do it professionally and massively with state funding, but at least it would be much more time consuming and expensive for them to do so.
No way to avoid. And yes. They are all bots on YouTube. Been that way for nearly a year.
All the major news is also owned by Israel. So.
Just be mindful of the fake comments and fake news on YouTube.
I think we more need to get people to realize that opinions from the internet (and networks) are just in general not legitamate enough and they need to talk with actual people who are around them and not take on ideas they see but actually take in the world and think about what they actually want the world to be.
While not immune, moving to FOSS, federated social media helps by removing the profit motive.
Oh, the level of bots on Youtube is atrocious, I wouldn’t even bother trying to fight it, you’re going to lose.
A number of the the troll farms and ai bot farms are paid work. Cut out of pay, and the employees will do other things.
How does one do that? Take out the sources of money, of which there are likely a few.
the only way is moderation and paywalls



