Over the past 5-6 months, I’ve been noticing a lot of new accounts spinning up that look like this format:
https://instance.xyz/u/gmbpjtmthttps://instance.xyz/u/tjrwwiifhttps://instance.xyz/u/xzowaikv
What are they doing?
They’re boosting and/or downvoting mostly, if not exclusively, US news and politics posts/comments to fit their agenda.
Edit: Could also be manipulating other regional news/politics, but my instance is regional and doesn’t subscribe to those which limits my visibility into the overall manipulation patterns.
What do these have in common?
- Most are on instances that have signups without applications (I’m guessing the few that are on instances with applications may be from before those were enabled since those are several months old, but just a guess; they could have easily just applied and been approved.)
- Most are random 8-character usernames (occasionally 7 or 9 characters)
- Most have a common set of users they’re upvoting and/or downvoting consistently
- No posts/comments
- No avatar or bio (that’s pretty common in general, but combine it with the other common attributes)
- Update: Have had several anonymous reports (thanks!) that these users are registering with an
@sharklasers.comemail address which is a throwaway email service.
What can you, as an instance admin, do?
Keep an eye on new registrations to your instance. If you see any that fit this pattern, pick a few (and a few off this list) and see if they’re voting along the same lines. You can also look in the login_token table to see if there is IP address overlap with other users on your instance and/or any other of these kinds of accounts.
You can also check the local_user table to see if the email addresses are from the same provider (not a guaranteed way to match them, but it can be a clue) or if they’re they same email address using plus-addressing (e.g. user+whatever@email.xyz, user+whatever2@emai.xyz, etc).
Why are they doing this?
Your guess is as good as mine, but US elections are in a few months, and I highly suspect some kind of interference campaign based on the volume of these that are being spun up and the content that’s being manipulated. That, or someone, possibly even a ghost or an alien life form, really wants the impression of public opinion being on their side. Just because I don’t know exactly why doesn’t mean that something fishy isn’t happening that other admins should be aware of.
Who are the known culprits?
These are ones fitting that pattern which have been identified. There are certainly more, but these have been positively identified. Some were omitted since they were more garden-variety “to win an argument” style manipulation.
These all seem to be part of a campaign. This list is by no means comprehensive, and if there are any false positives, I do apologize. I’ve tried to separate out the “garden variety” type from the ones suspected of being part of a campaign, but may have missed some.
[New: 9/18/2024]: https://thelemmy.club/u/fxgwxqdr
[New: 9/18/2024]: https://discuss.online/u/nyubznrw
[New: 9/18/2024]: https://thelemmy.club/u/ththygij
[New: 9/18/2024]: https://ttrpg.network/u/umwagkpn
[New: 9/18/2024]: https://lemdro.id/u/dybyzgnn
[New: 9/18/2024]: https://lemmy.cafe/u/evtmowdq
https://leminal.space/u/mpiaaqzq
https://lemy.lol/u/ihuklfle
https://lemy.lol/u/iltxlmlr
https://lemy.lol/u/szxabejt
https://lemy.lol/u/woyjtear
https://lemy.lol/u/jikuwwrq
https://lemy.lol/u/matkalla
https://lemmy.ca/u/vlnligvx
https://ttrpg.network/u/kmjsxpie
https://lemmings.world/u/ueosqnhy
https://lemmings.world/u/mx_myxlplyx
https://startrek.website/u/girlbpzj
https://startrek.website/u/iorxkrdu
https://lemy.lol/u/tjrwwiif
https://lemy.lol/u/gmbpjtmt
https://thelemmy.club/u/avlnfqko
https://lemmy.today/u/blmpaxlm
https://lemy.lol/u/xhivhquf
https://sh.itjust.works/u/ntiytakd
https://jlai.lu/u/rpxhldtm
https://sh.itjust.works/u/ynvzpcbn
https://lazysoci.al/u/sksgvypn
https://lemy.lol/u/xzowaikv
https://lemy.lol/u/yecwilqu
https://lemy.lol/u/hwbjkxly
https://lemy.lol/u/kafbmgsy
https://discuss.online/u/tcjqmgzd
https://thelemmy.club/u/vcnzovqk
https://lemy.lol/u/gqvnyvvz
https://lazysoci.al/u/shcimfi
https://lemy.lol/u/u0hc7r
https://startrek.website/u/uoisqaru
https://jlai.lu/u/dtxiuwdx
https://discuss.online/u/oxwquohe
https://thelemmy.club/u/iicnhcqx
https://lemmings.world/u/uzinumke
https://startrek.website/u/evuorban
https://thelemmy.club/u/dswaxohe
https://lemdro.id/u/efkntptt
https://lemy.lol/u/ozgaolvw
https://lemy.lol/u/knylgpdv
https://discuss.online/u/omnajmxc
https://lemmy.cafe/u/iankglbrdurvstw
https://lemmy.ca/u/awuochoj
https://leminal.space/u/tjrwwiif
https://lemy.lol/u/basjcgsz
https://lemy.lol/u/smkkzswd
https://lazysoci.al/u/qokpsqnw
https://lemy.lol/u/ncvahblj
https://ttrpg.network/u/hputoioz
https://lazysoci.al/u/lghikcpj
https://lemmy.ca/u/xnjaqbzs
https://lemy.lol/u/yonkz
Edit: If you see anyone from your instance on here, please please please verify before taking any action. I’m only able to cross-check these against the content my instance is aware of.
It’s painfully obvious lemmy is overrun with astroturf. Kamala spam has been oppressive and it’s just cringe most of the time. I refuse to believe that most of the real users here are that cringe. Also, I support Kamala.
deleted by creator
I’m really not sure. 47k monthly active users, between 30% to 50% of them not American, and those who are are already going to vote Democrat, is it really worth the hassle?
They spamming that site into every cravice of the internet they can.
Because we lean democrat, our user base accepts it. I get if they shill your “team” it doesn’t feel as offensive. But it is an malicious operation.
These clowns running the politics and news subs are bad faith actors and they should their hand with kamala shill ops.
Just an opinion but I have been saying this for months and now it feel good to be particularly validated.
The blue wave doesn’t care about wisdom or agency any more than MAGA. The masses mistake revolutionary and Russian agent in false dichotomy. And, the .world mods are more than complicit.
The majority here will hate you for truth. There are better venues for it.
I wouldn’t assume which way the astroturf is going. Would need to look at the accounts fiirst.
Its funny because there’s a user assuming the astro turf is going the other direction and they’re getting mostly up voted. Too many people are thinking with their feelings instead of their brain.
deleted by creator
Thank you for your service 🫡
We have our own astroturfing bots, did we make it?
Make it harder to moderate? Sure!
I believe “Russian Bot Farm Presence” is the preferred metric of social network relevance in the scientific community.
Lol, that sounds like a Randall Munroe unit of measurement, and I love it. If there’s not already an xkcd for that, there should be.
I hope this post doesn’t tank the monthly active users stats lol. Mostly that’s me hoping this problem isn’t as big as I fear.
Oooh, good point. That would mess with Lemmyverse data, which would be annoying for discovery
What surprises me is that these seem to be all on other instances - including a few big ones like just.works - rather than someone spinning up their own instance to create unlimited accounts to downvote/spam/etc.
Not really: if you’re astroturfing, you don’t do all your astroturfing from a single source because that makes it so obvious even a blind person could see it and sort it out.
You do it from all over the places, mixed in with as much real user traffic as you can, and then do it steadily and without being hugely bursty from a single location.
Humans are very good at pattern matching and recognition (which is why we’ve not all been eaten by tigers and leopards) and will absolutely spot the single source, or extremely high volume from a single source, or even just the looks-weird-should-investigate-more pattern you’d get from, for example, exactly what happened to cause this post.
TLDR: they’re doing this because they’re trying to evade humans and ML models by spreading the load around, making it not a single source, and also trying to mix it in with places that would also likely have substantial real human traffic because uh, that’s what you do if you’re hoping to not be caught.
I just had a look at https://lemy.lol/, and they have email verification enabled, so it’s not just people finding instances without email check to spam account on there.
@iso@lemy.lol and @QuazarOmega@lemy.lol FYI
Alright. I’ll check this ASAP.
Thanks!
Yeah I’ve had email verification on since the first bot signup wave like a year ago and we have a few on the list here.
Thanks. I edited the wording for “open signups”. I meant “without applications” enabled since it’s trivial to use a throwaway email service
Email verification is super easy to get around. It’s practically not a barrier at all.
It’s small step, but still a step
I used to think so, but it’s barely even that.
I’ve had 3 instance admins confirm anonymously that these were using a throwaway email service.
sharklasers.comspecifically.Can some email services be blacklisted?
Some instances do, but I think it’s more of an automod configuration. AFAIK, Lemmy doesn’t have that capability out of the box. Not sure about other fed platforms.
Mastodon has the ability to blacklist certain email providers, and I think also email IP addresses.
I have a manual process for admitting people, do I need to do anything if I know exactly who is on my instance, or do I need to do anything to protect my instance from other bad acting instances (beyond defederating, which I do when I notice a lot of spam). Any queries you recommend?
I have a manual process for admitting people, do I need to do anything if I know exactly who is on my instance,
With that in place, I wouldn’t think so. I’m in the same boat with a small instance that has always used applications. The problematic accounts I’ve noticed are all using these random, 8-character names and seem to be setting up shop across open instances w/o applications. So chances are, if you’re manually admitting people, you’d have noticed these already and likely not approved them.
do I need to do anything to protect my instance from other bad acting instances
Unfortunately, defederating only protects your instance’s users from being impacted by the manipulations. Beyond that, it’s less a bad instance rather than them being taken advantage of (kind of like our persistent troll who instance hops every few days).
For now, I’ve just banned the vote manipulation accounts and moved on (this PSA notwithstanding lol) I wouldn’t consider these a “defederation worthy” offense. When I do defed, it’s for bigger reasons or just temporary due to spam (sometimes admins can’t deal with it right away but it’s causing a huge problem now and I need to do something in the short term).
Queries, I do have some, but they’re ugly AF. lol. I should prob look into starting a Matrix room or admin community where we can share and improve each others’ utility scripts.
Queries, I do have some, but they’re ugly AF. lol. I should prob look into starting a Matrix room or admin community where we can share and improve each others’ utility scripts.
That’s pretty much the official Lemmy space’s Moderation tools room, right?
Possibly. I don’t think I’ve been in or active in it for a while. With check it out.
I don’t think anyone has been active in it for a while 😆. Would be a good place for it though as there are still lots of eyes on the room even if no one is chatting.
I see most of them are on the same “lemy.lol” instance.
removed by mod
Fedia hiding the activity is one of those things that I kinda dislike, as it was an easy way to detect certain trolls.
yeah, i’m split on public votes.
On one hand, yeah, there’s a certain type of troll that would be easy to detect. It would also put more eyes on the problem I’m describing here.
On the other, you’d have people doing retaliatory downvotes for no reason other than revenge. That, or reporting everyone who downvoted them.
It depends on the person to use that “power” responsibly, and there are clearly people out there who would not wield it responsibly lol.
I think retaliatory downvotes happen either way if you’re in an argument. Same with report abuse, which, if it happens to a high degree, would be the moderator’s responsibility to ban the perpetrator (reports here are not anonymous like they were on Reddit).
Also, if there’s someone with an abusive mind, they can easily use another instance that shows Activity to identify downvoters. The vote is public either way for federation purposes, they’re just hidden from certain instances - at least on the user level, but they’re still there technically.
Im fully against public down votes becaue I already see people calling out other users by their name in threads they’re not even part of. Theres no world where that behavior gets better when you give them more tools to witch hunt. Lemmy is as much an insular echo chamber as any social media and there are plenty of users dedicated to keeping it that way.
As an end user, ie. not someone who either hosts an instance or has extra permissions, can we in anyway see who voted on a post or comment?
I’m asking because over the time I’ve been here, I’ve noticed that many, but not all, posts or comments attract a solitary down vote.
I see this type of thing all over the place. Sometimes it’s two down votes, indicating that it happens more than once.
I note that human behaviour might explain this to some extent, but the voting happens almost immediately, in the face of either no response, or positive interactions.
Feels a lot like the Reddit down vote bots.
At the moment, admins can see the votes. Mods are going to in a future version (https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4392 )
Good to know. I’m going to have to account for that in Tesseract.
As a regular user, I don’t think there’s much you can do, unfortunately (though thank you for your willingness to help!). Sometimes you can look at a post/comment from Kbin to see the votes, but I think Mbin only shows the upvotes. Most former kbin instances, I believe, switched to mbin when development on kbin stalled.
The solitary downvotes are annoying for sure. “Some people, sigh” is just my response to that. I just ignore those.
Re: Downvote bots. I can’t say they’re necessarily bots, but my instance has scripts that flag accounts that exclusively give out downvotes and then bans them. That’s about the best I can do, at present, to counter those for my users.
Re: Downvote bots. I can’t say they’re necessarily bots, but my instance has scripts that flag accounts that exclusively give out downvotes and then bans them. That’s about the best I can do, at present, to counter those for my users.
It is usually not a good idea to specify what your exact metrics are for a ban. A bad actor could see that and then get around it by randomly upvoting something every now and then.
True. But it uses a threshold ratio. They’d have to give out a proportional number of upvotes to “fool” it, and at that point, they’re an average Lemmy user lol. That script isn’t (currently) setup to detect targeted vote brigading, just ones that are only here to downvote stuff. I’ve got other scripts to detect that, but they just generate daily/weekly reports.
It takes time to detect them, but it does prevent most false positives that way (better to err on the side of caution and all that).
note to self, if my instance ever fold
join @dubvee.org
In case people are wondering these bots are advocating for Kamala Harris.
Dessalines is the developer of Lemmy and occasionally notifies users their posts are being botted
Dessalines notified me on two of my own posts that they were heavily downvoted by low /zero content accounts in the past as well.
Democrat posting is ruining this site
Their entire agenda hangs on people not jumping ship because everybody just loves Democrats so much and the alternatives are not popular enough.
Nobody is even arguing that they like Democrats anymore, it’s just yapping about how Biden (and now Kamala) is the only viable option to win. If it turns out alternatives are actually popular enough that enough people are willing to jump ship the entire narrative sinks.
Consider the alternative of putting the Green platform on every ballot in 2028, overcoming the first and largest obstacle maintaining duopoly. It takes only 5% of the GE popular. Then, watch as Democrats panic to maintain the “big tent” for four years.
I’m a triple minority. I’ve suffered assholes my whole life. Things got worse under Trump. But, that damage is already done. In this facet nothing changes for me if it’s Trump once again. I’m not afraid. We must think in terms much greater than four years.
largest obstacle maintaining duopoly
The duopoly is maintained by First Past the Post. If we want meaningful change, we must change the voting system.
https://ncase.me/ballot/ http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/ https://cdsmithus.medium.com/simulating-elections-with-spatial-voter-models-1ff50892390
You’re flat out wrong, likely rooted in ignorance of the system. Without choice on the ballot it can’t be voted for. The obstacles to access are far greater than winning an ideoloical majority.
No, you are flat out wrong. Read the links I shared. Statistically, it is nearly impossible for a third party to win under FPTP; you may as well buy lottery tickets. The most a third party can do is create a spoiler effect. This is regardless of being on the ballot or campaigning a lot.
The voting system must be changed. Neither the Democrats or the Republicans will advocate for this, however, since they both enjoy having roughly half the pie.
I need not read links to identify your false premise. The goal isn’t that a certain party win. The revolutionary isn’t loyal to party, only principle. It doesn’t matter which group of opportunistic assholes “win”.
The Democrats dont have Ranked Choice voting on their agenda this is a red herring.
The Greens have RCV though! 2 in 1!
And without something like RCV, the greens can never win.
You’re presenting a safe with the key locked inside.
Yes yes she can never win and Biden is the best candidate. We know the drill. Democrat voters know how politics work right
I have been calling this shit since DNc did that switcheroo trick. For which I was needlessly down voted. I just blocked news and politics subs.
Good to see some hard evidence that we got DNC komissars around.
People can support kamala all they want but when somebody is spending money to set narratives, even supporters should raise an eye brow. What is this really about?
Just beware the bias here. Only pointing this out for people working against their agenda doesn’t mean there isn’t the same going on for the other side…just that they aren’t going to point it out as it doesn’t help their agenda.
Trump lacks the numbers, the budget, and the leadership. Much has changed in 8 years.
It isn’t trump’s people pushing the buttons. The people running around before Biden dropped out yelling “Genocide Joe” almost definitely weren’t under trump’s control, and were possibly paid foreign actors. The same was true 8 years ago.
The USA kills lots of people: Native Americans, African Americans, Arabs, Asians. We’re still doing it, now even to whites in Ukraine. It’s all to feed the military industrial complex, just as Eisenhower warned. War is why capital reserves for banks have been raised and why the Fed speaks of lowering the borrow rate. Admitting it is the difference between a patriot and a nationalist.
removed by mod
They never implied you were white, they implied you were racist.
If Left wing content was upbotted I’m quite sure the Lemmy.World admins would notice and point it out very quickly.
That’s funny.
What stops the botters from setting up their own instances to create unlimited users for manipulating votes?
Nothing, really. Though bad instances like that would be quickly defederated from most. But yeah, admins would have to keep an eye on things to determine that and take action.
They usually get found out pretty easily and then defederated by everyone. There’s a service called fediseer which allows instance admins to flag instances as harmful, which other admins can use to determine if they should block an instance.
In order for that to really work they would have to rotate between a lot of domain names either by changing their own instance’s domain or using a proxy. Either way they’d run out of domains rather quickly.
It’s way easier for them to just get accounts on the big servers and hide there as if they were normal lurking users.
Project like https://gui.fediseer.com/
this has already happened multiple times. they get found out fairly quickly and defederated by pretty much everyone.
Another data point in favor of supporters of Dead Internet Theory .
Also, this is one more example of why it would be better if instances charged a little bit from everyone: spammers will rather run things from their own machines (or some illegal botnet) than paying something with a credit card.
That may work, or you’d just get a bunch of chargebacks from stolen credit cards lol.
I do like the idea of some kind of verification besides from a questionnaire, but I’m not sure what would ever get traction.
you’d just get a bunch of chargebacks from stolen credit cards lol.
Criminals use stolen credit cards for high value items that can be sold quickly. If criminals really wanted to do mass manipulation via AP servers, it will be easier/faster/cheaper for them to spin up their own servers than signing up for paid accounts.
The one counter-argument that I would accept though: what if bad actors running psyops become commercial providers to attract legit customers and mix it with their agents?
True.
I guess my main hangup with payment-based registration is trust. Personally, even though I am willing to pay for a Lemmy account (I guess I technically do since I run an instance), I would be between hesitant and completely avoidant to giving payment info to a random instance that could be hosted by anyone.
If they use some kind of well-known, trusted donation/payment service, I guess that could alleviate that. Now that I think about it, it may also encourage people to use instances more local to them since they would probably want to recognize the donation platform the instance uses. (e.g. if an instance used a donation/payment service that’s only well-known in Sweden, I would have absolutely no idea as an American if it was legit or not, would not risk it, and would choose a different instance).
I’m still not completely for the idea of requiring payment for sign up, but I definitely can see the benefits to it.
Pretty much any payment processor nowadays work in a way that the merchant has no direct access with payment data. And is there any place where Stripe and/or is not widely known?
And if you are an admin of a paid-only instance (like mine) then obviously you want to use a trustworthy processor to avoid yet-another friction point. In my case, the only people that didn’t want to use Stripe were the ones that wanted to pay me in cryptocurrency.
Stripe is pretty much global, outside of some weird prepaid/debit cards in various places which just don’t work.
The bigger problem is that the number of chargebacks you need to get your merchant account killed with them is very small if you don’t have substantial dollar/transaction volume which a Lemmy admin isn’t horribly likely to have.
And of course, their chargeback fees in general are unpleasant though that’s more of a universal problem than a Stripe problem.
That’s one thing that nobody really ever talks about when it comes to discussing payment verification. The fact that the people who are willing to commit scams and fraud are also willing to steal credit or debit cards.
Yeah nah man. I’m poor as fuck. Like usually have cents left if my bank account poor, and don’t always have meals poor. I ain’t paying a penny, even though I love lemmy.
I’ll give my ID or passport before I pay money.
Everytime someone uses phrases like “Dead internet theory”, I assume they’re some crab living under a rock with limited real world experiences. And it fits every time.
After digging into it, we banned the two sh.itjust.works accounts mentioned in this post. A quick search of the database did not reveal any similar accounts, though that doesn’t mean they aren’t there.
I’ve seen it often on pro-Israel accounts before. But they’re usually all registered a year ago and cycled through posting content.
Such as @idoubledo@lemmy.sdf.org.
Ethically, I can’t (and won’t). I’m only comfortable and confident enough to share the list of sockpuppet accounts I’ve confirmed and provide the information necessary to detect them. I did list the topics I’m aware of (US news and politics), but I’m only able to see activity based on what my instance knows about. So they may be manipulating other communities, but if my instance doesn’t subscribe to them (or they’re by posters that have been banned), I have no way of seeing it.
That’s actually why I posted this. My visibility is limited, so once I identified the pattern, I’m passing that along to other admins for awareness.
This Blue MAGA shit is so fucking funny to me. It is the laziest no u. It came out of nowhere, they provide absolutely nothing to back it up. They just show up screaming Blue MAGA. I kind of miss the days when trolls actually tried. It isn’t even fun anymore, and they just run away when you hit them with a factual rebuttal
I got banned from one of the politics communities for calling out someone using the “blue maga” phrase. I called them ambitious and then called called them weirdo and got my comment removed for “attack language”, when I quested the mod they banned me for a few days. I will avoid any communities that mod is a part of.
Lemmy should have the option to defederate from instances depending on automated criteria. Sign ups without admin checks are a great attribute to use for defederation, because it leads to such abuse. I’ve finally blocked most communities and instances that have news about US politics and have a clean feed, but for newcomers, that shit is everywhere.
It’s not a native feature, but some instances have a script or plugin (not super familiar with it beyond a general awareness of its existence) that can tie their federation allow/block lists with Fediseer. So, like, if an instance gets censured by a bunch of other instances you’re on good terms with, it can automatically pick that up and add it to your block list.
I don’t hate the idea of that, and I have seen it protect a few instances from several spam waves, but I haven’t implemented it myself.
I think Beehaw is defederated from lemmy.world and shitjustworks because of abuse stemming from auto signups
