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/gmbpjtmt
  • https://instance.xyz/u/tjrwwiif
  • https://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?

  1. 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.)
  2. Most are random 8-character usernames (occasionally 7 or 9 characters)
  3. Most have a common set of users they’re upvoting and/or downvoting consistently
  4. No posts/comments
  5. No avatar or bio (that’s pretty common in general, but combine it with the other common attributes)
  6. Update: Have had several anonymous reports (thanks!) that these users are registering with an @sharklasers.com email 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.

    • Coelacanth@feddit.nuEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      I believe “Russian Bot Farm Presence” is the preferred metric of social network relevance in the scientific community.

      • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgOPEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        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.

    • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgOPEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      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.

    • abff08f4813c@j4vcdedmiokf56h3ho4t62mlku.srv.usEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      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.

      • schizo@forum.uncomfortable.businessEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        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.

    • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgOPEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      I strongly advise verifying first, but yes.

      I can only verify them based on the posts/comment votes my instance is aware of.

  • dethada@lemmy.zipEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    Is there any existing opensource tool for manipulation detection for lemmy? If not we should create one to reduce the manual workload for instance admins

    • johannesvanderwhales@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      If there were, upbotters would use it to verify that new bottling methods weren’t detectable. There’s a reason why reddit has so much obfuscation around voting and bans.

      • dethada@lemmy.zipEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        Good point, but is it then possible to come up with detection algorithms that makes it hard for upbotters even if they know the algorithm? I think that would be more ideal than security through obfuscation but not sure how feasible that is

        • johannesvanderwhales@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          2 months ago

          I don’t know honestly. Really, with AI it would be pretty difficult to be foolproof. I’m thinking of the MIT card counting group and how they played as archetypal players to obscure their activities. You could easily make an account that upvoted content in a way that looked plausible. I’m sure there are many real humans that upvote stories positive to one political party and downvote a different political party. Edit: I mean fuck, if you wanted to, you could create an instance just to train your model. Edit 2: For that matter, you could create an instance to bypass any screening for botters…

  • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    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.

    • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgOPEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      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.

      • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        you’d just get a bunch of chargebacks from stolen credit cards lol.

        Criminals use stolen credit cards when 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?

        • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgOPEnglish
          0·
          2 months ago

          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.

          • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
            0·
            2 months ago

            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.

            • schizo@forum.uncomfortable.businessEnglish
              0·
              2 months ago

              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.

      • Draconic NEO@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        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.

    • FundMECFSResearch@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      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.

      • 7oo7@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        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.

  • Onno (VK6FLAB)@lemmy.radioEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    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.

    • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgOPEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      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.

      • Tanoh@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        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.

        • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgOPEnglish
          0·
          2 months ago

          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).

  • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.techEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    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?

    • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgOPEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      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.

      • Dave@lemmy.nzEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        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?

          • Dave@lemmy.nzEnglish
            0·
            2 months ago

            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.

  • onlinepersona@programming.devEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    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.

    Anti Commercial-AI license

    • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgOPEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      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.

  • Lampshade@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    What stops the botters from setting up their own instances to create unlimited users for manipulating votes?

    I guess admins also have to be on top of detecting and defederating from such instances?

    • Mac@mander.xyzEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      this has already happened multiple times. they get found out fairly quickly and defederated by pretty much everyone.

    • Draconic NEO@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      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.

    • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgOPEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      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.

  • catloaf@lemm.eeEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    Lemmy should do something like make captcha and email verification the default in the next version, and reject federation from anyone with a lower version. If we accept federation from any instance where this was never turned on, banning accounts one by one is worse than Sisyphean. They’ll just keep finding more vulnerable instances that are already trusted and abuse them to spam the rest of the fediverse.

    If admins want to manually turn it off, then they should be prepared to manage that.

      • catloaf@lemm.eeEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        If instances are unmaintained, losing them is probably a good thing.

        • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
          0·
          2 months ago

          Blahaj is not unmaintained but it only upgraded from 0.19.3 a few weeks ago. They are always a tad behind, and so I think calling them “unmaintained” is a bit much.

        • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgEnglish
          0·
          2 months ago

          Not sure you want to lose Lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works and programming.dev, that would be around 40% of the active userbase

        • Draconic NEO@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          2 months ago

          I think it’s unreasonable to call every instance that doesn’t update immediately with every release “unmaintained” if anything a lot of these bleeding edge instances which update to the latest version immediately without waiting at all are kind of reckless.

          After all everyone remembers the Federation bugs that were present in one of the releases and ended up being very bad for a lot of the instances, it caused content to fail to be federated between the instances. Not good.

          So I’m really not into the idea of trying to force or incentivize updates to unstable and untested versions if admins are unwilling to do it. And I’m especially not into the idea of criticizing admins who prefer to hold off on updating until they are sure the versions are stable.

  • Rookwood@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    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.

    • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      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?

      • sunzu2@thebrainbin.org
        0·
        2 months ago

        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.

    • Fish [Indiana]@midwest.socialEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      There are plenty of Lemmy users that don’t support Kamala. She is very pro Israel and has a far right immigration policy. Aside from those two major issues, she loves the police and keeps talking about ensuring that the US has the most “lethal” military. She also talks about deregulating housing and doing tax cuts for new parents, which does nothing to actually address the issues contributing to a high cost of living. Harris has a good stance on abortion, but that’s about all she’s got. I can’t in good conscience vote for someone so awful.

      • nondescripthandle@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        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.

    • SirDerpy@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      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.