Is this account a bot? This question’s importance is only growing in a world of LLMs and state-backed influence campaigns. Proposed here is Botwatch, a community-based system for personalized bot detection. In Botwatch, users publish records indicating whether they think others are bots and records indicating trust in a user’s scores. By analyzing this network, we can create useful signals to help users distinguish between bots and humans. Such a signal would consider your trust relations and o...
Botwatch
Fight bots by warning others. Support humans with verification. Build communities with trust.
Botender: Supporting Communities in Collaboratively Designing AI Agents through Case-Based Provocations
AI agents, or bots, serve important roles in online communities. However, they are often designed by outsiders or a few tech-savvy members, leading to bots that may not align with the broader community's needs. How might communities collectively shape the behavior of community bots? We present Botender, a system that enables communities to collaboratively design LLM-powered bots without coding. With Botender, community members can directly propose, iterate on, and deploy custom bot behaviors tailored to community needs. Botender facilitates testing and iteration on bot behavior through case-based provocations: interaction scenarios generated to spark user reflection and discussion around desirable bot behavior. A validation study found these provocations more useful than standard test cases for revealing improvement opportunities and surfacing disagreements. During a five-day deployment across six Discord servers, Botender supported communities in tailoring bot behavior to their specific needs, showcasing the usefulness of case-based provocations in facilitating collaborative bot design.
Commence the Botwatch | Botwatch Blog
Bots were already a pain online when they were little more than if-then scripts. Now a tidal wave of slop is swamping the internet as big tech companies profit. OpenAI and the rest would love for you to believe they care about "alignment" and "values" while their AI models damage our communities, both online and off. It's time to fight back.
First Evidence That Social Bots Play a Major Role in Spreading Fake News
Automated accounts are being programmed to spread fake news, according to the first systematic study of the way online misinformation spreads
Katika Kühnreich (@Katika@chaos.social)
Attached: 1 image #SocialMedia of #realnameregistration , oh sorry, they call it real #humans , that advertises with " #AI " #slop #wsocial is more than problematic And already has #bots crawling it's #network Now they show that they are problematic concerning #aesthetics as well & advertise with tasteless #aislop @bildoperationen@tldr.nettime.org #realnameregistration is highly dangerous & if the company that wants to have your most private data can't save there net from bots they're not very trustworthy, are they? #tech
AI-driven Bot Attacks Surged 12.5x According to Thales Bad Bot Report
Bots now dominate the internet, accounting for over half of all traffic, with 40% classified as malicious.AI is erasing the line between legitimate and maliciou
A General Method to Find Highly Coordinating Communities in Social Media through Inferred Interaction Links
Political misinformation, astroturfing and organised trolling are online malicious behaviours with significant real-world effects. Many previous approaches examining these phenomena have focused on broad campaigns rather than the small groups responsible for instigating or sustaining them. To reveal latent (i.e., hidden) networks of cooperating accounts, we propose a novel temporal window approach that relies on account interactions and metadata alone. It detects groups of accounts engaging in various behaviours that, in concert, come to execute different goal-based strategies, a number of which we describe. The approach relies upon a pipeline that extracts relevant elements from social media posts, infers connections between accounts based on criteria matching the coordination strategies to build an undirected weighted network of accounts, which is then mined for communities exhibiting high levels of evidence of coordination using a novel community extraction method. We address the temporal aspect of the data by using a windowing mechanism, which may be suitable for near real-time application. We further highlight consistent coordination with a sliding frame across multiple windows and application of a decay factor. Our approach is compared with other recent similar processing approaches and community detection methods and is validated against two relevant datasets with ground truth data, using content, temporal, and network analyses, as well as with the design, training and application of three one-class classifiers built using the ground truth; its utility is furthermore demonstrated in two case studies of contentious online discussions.
Want to know more about the recent bot activity, what we've seen, and what we've done/are doing? Check out our write-up here! ✒️ 🔗 blog.tophhie.cloud/increased-bot-activity-what-w… Special mentions: @revfox84.bsky.social, @michelbestaat.thereforeiam.eu, @bmann.ca, and @baileytownsend.dev.
Increased Bot Activity & What We're Doing About It
blog.tophhie.cloudMade a simple Discord bot for the userandagents.com community which archives all messages and links from users who opt-in to a specific role, so we can distill into a model ( aggregate community brain) or make daily link digests or etc and whatnot. github.com/autonome/phenomena
GitHub - autonome/phenomena: Discord bot for userandagents.com
github.comi wonder how much of this can be prototyped in userland with no new ui eg just a thing that creates “collection” accounts operated by bots. curators can post stuff there by dm’ing the bot. as a reader, you follow the account, so naturally it plays into your Following and For You etc
dan
“semble for bluesky inside bluesky app” is a good way to articulate exactly what i’m missing in the product. custom feeds are like half of that but they’re a readonly interface
