On an individual level: respond to bots/trolls with the goal of providing accurate information and a perspective grounded for the benefit of uninformed lurkers who are reading but not commenting.

Don’t get baited into arguments, just do your best to provide clarity so that bots have a harder time spreading misinformation.

No way to avoid. And yes. They are all boys 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.

While not immune, moving to FOSS, federated social media helps by removing the profit motive.

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.

Oh, the level of bots on Youtube is atrocious, I wouldn’t even bother trying to fight it, you’re going to lose.

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.

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