There are a few options. The best of those is part of a larger reform of how instances, and general forums they interact on, could be run. Rather than moderators that just decide on violations, bans, etc., we have a clear set of rules, with a clear set of appeal processes for bans and the like. Culminating in a jury trial of members for that instance. Maybe a higher court to decide strictly on liability grounds for users that endanger legality even with acquittals.

Beyond that, instances could have some sort of process, maybe even election of qualified users* to appoint censors, that would have tools to hunt bots and influence operations, and flags of users would be forwarded to them, and moderators. Any enforcement actions would go through that appeal process to prevent abuses of power or misapplications of rules.

I'd say, do it like Rome did, for every elected position, and I will get to some others, not to elect one, but two. The first two highest vote getters each get elected with the same powers. It worked for 500 years for them.

There are some other positions we could even do elections through. Now who qualifies for elections? We could have threads where votes of reasoned arguments determine it, votes from qualified people that pass captchas perhaps. It's kind of a chicken or egg problem with voting online if influence agents and chatbots and bots are voting is the problem. Agents could cycle through accounts and do captchas, and chatbots of llm's might already be able to complete the captchas, so that might not work.

How else could we limit voting? Maybe just by making reasoned arguments for why we should be on the voting lists, and having users with their own positive voting record able to vote, as the bots and chatbots won't have much karma without being spotted by the censors and moderators and the like?

So I got bogged down here, but to summarize, to appoint two censors, selected by the community for 1 year terms, or whatever, that can hunt and charge accounts for removal/banning, under clear sets of rules that can be appealed to jury trials of users of the instance. Secure online trials. Maybe tests for suspected accounts.

The trickier part, making a system of real good faith users to be able to vote so influence agents and bots and llm's don't ratfuck the votes, jury trials, etc. There would be ways, we could even establish secure end to end encryption to verify real users person to person if the person agrees, just spitballing here,

But to maybe think about some other elected positions every term to fulfill other functions of the community. To have the clear rules and appealable enforcements to a jury trial of real users.

Because a censor that is vetted and possessing of some analytics tools, and moderators and administrators as they are able, would be able to hunt down suspected bots and influence agents and have them removed. Not all but a lot of them. Industry ones that work off of keyword for instance, say glyphosate bad and an influence agent with bots pops up in a half hour and argues endlessly if you argue back, it' not subtle. The ones pushing for Iran forever war as we speak, also many are not subtle.

One more thing to add. To make a separate form of karma, that results from doing favors for the community, for others, that can be traded like favors and used to qualify people. We can have real world versions for some social media applications, to be traded like credits or money, and instance type versions, not based on votes neccessarily, but for doing jobs for the community, for acting successfully as censor, or moderator, or administrator, or whatever other functions.