this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2024
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Santabot

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Santabot is an automated moderation tool, designed to reduce moderation load and remove bad actors in a way that is transparent to all and mostly resistant to abuse and evasion.

This is a community devoted to meta discussion for the bot.

founded 5 months ago
MODERATORS
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  1. It would be extraordinarily easy to bot it and just silence anyone you want.
  2. I agree, moderation is absolutely necessary to maintaine civil discussion, but silencing people, because they have unpopular opinions, is a really bad idea.
  3. I love lemmy because it is the ultimate embodiment of decentralised free speech. This destroys that.
  4. If I were a bad actor, hypothetically, let's just say lammy.ml or haxbear and I decided I wanted to silence anyone who disagrees with what I have to say. Then I could just make a fork of this project to only value my instances votes and censor anyone who doesn't agree with what my community thinks.
  5. This tool simply acts as a force multiplier for those who want to use censorship as a tool for mass silencing of descent.

Yes, I've read the Q&A, But I can simply think of more ways to abuse this bot for bad than it can be used for good.

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[–] muntedcrocodile@lemm.ee 1 points 2 months ago (2 children)

You can try. Make a bunch of accounts on one of those instances that doesn’t police their signups very well, downvote everything I’ve ever done with all of those accounts, and see if I get banned. I think it’s more difficult to accomplish this than you think.

challenge accepted!

I got some questions tho:

  • Do instances have rankings or are all users considered equall? i see issues with both cases.
  • Are all upvotes equall?
  • how does instances with disabled downvotes work?
  • what about single direction federation?
  • can u give me some number on the effectivness of upvotes per account downvoting on a user.

My contraversial opinions got me banned by the bot and unbanned recently i assume due to tuning of some parameters of something.

I saw that post i think it will definatly help alleviate some of the concerns. Open sourcing it sounds like a good idea till u realise anyone can then use it to purposely be malicious so thats an even worse idea its a complex issue that thankfully i dont gotta solve.

I do t see how its a privacy violation all the raw votes are public anyways i guess its just ur bots judgements that are private. Ur welcome to post my results publicly since its all open anyways.

I mean u can always anonimise the data use a cheap locally hosted ai to paraphrase/extract the relevent points from the text and hash + salt usernames etc.

I will try it if i can get away with using my own instance then creating accounts on an industrial scale is easily doable. Thx for the info do instances have ranking or can i manufacture heigh ranked accounts on a single instance (even if i cant doing it across many instances is just a matter of purchasing a hacked account list.

Im greatfull for you licence to develop a system designed to try abuse ur bot. As long as i dont get defederated it should be doable without resorting to illegal practice's (buying stolen accounts etc).

I can print about 1k upvotes per 5minutes with 200accounts each account will have about 1/200th that many votes per 5minutes (rank building). Is this pace significant enough to influence ur algorithm?

Currently just proof of concept on my own server (although it is federated). Can easily be defederated to block this but thats only cos i dont wanna be botting someone elses server. Accounts are created with significantly real enough data to feed to an llm/image generator to make them indistinguishable from real account activity to farm votes for rankings or disseminate propaganda or whatever.