The amount of propaganda bots trying to sign up lately is bonkers.
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The amount of propaganda bots trying to sign up lately is bonkers. The fediverse feels like it’s becoming a battleground for information warfare. Be safe out there
@jerry Do you have any examples that you can share? How can regular users spot them? I'm guessing that they're not particularly sophisticated, but are there "signs?"
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@jerry Do you have any examples that you can share? How can regular users spot them? I'm guessing that they're not particularly sophisticated, but are there "signs?"
@muddle the easiest way to spot them is stolen profile pics, usually of someone notable but not super famous, sort of unremarkable bio on their profile, and they post almost exclusively about a topic that somewhat polarizing. The big ones at the moment are accounts posting articles that are negative about Ukraine and its president and their performance in the war. But I also see the same from the Ukraine side. Accounts have signed up with .gov.il email addresses to post things favorable to Israel. Behind the scenes, they normally use tor to connect, use email accounts on disposable email domains, and don’t make a lot of sense when explaining why they want to join.
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@muddle the easiest way to spot them is stolen profile pics, usually of someone notable but not super famous, sort of unremarkable bio on their profile, and they post almost exclusively about a topic that somewhat polarizing. The big ones at the moment are accounts posting articles that are negative about Ukraine and its president and their performance in the war. But I also see the same from the Ukraine side. Accounts have signed up with .gov.il email addresses to post things favorable to Israel. Behind the scenes, they normally use tor to connect, use email accounts on disposable email domains, and don’t make a lot of sense when explaining why they want to join.
@muddle we try to stamp them out as we see them or as they are reported, plus we are rejecting about 20-30 new accounts each day that are clearly this sort of account. Harder to keep them out when they join other instances though
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@muddle the easiest way to spot them is stolen profile pics, usually of someone notable but not super famous, sort of unremarkable bio on their profile, and they post almost exclusively about a topic that somewhat polarizing. The big ones at the moment are accounts posting articles that are negative about Ukraine and its president and their performance in the war. But I also see the same from the Ukraine side. Accounts have signed up with .gov.il email addresses to post things favorable to Israel. Behind the scenes, they normally use tor to connect, use email accounts on disposable email domains, and don’t make a lot of sense when explaining why they want to join.
@jerry really useful and informative. Thanks!
I sometimes have a problem with deciding whether some accounts have some sort of agenda or whether it's someone I just disagree with. I suppose everyone has the same problem, though
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@muddle the easiest way to spot them is stolen profile pics, usually of someone notable but not super famous, sort of unremarkable bio on their profile, and they post almost exclusively about a topic that somewhat polarizing. The big ones at the moment are accounts posting articles that are negative about Ukraine and its president and their performance in the war. But I also see the same from the Ukraine side. Accounts have signed up with .gov.il email addresses to post things favorable to Israel. Behind the scenes, they normally use tor to connect, use email accounts on disposable email domains, and don’t make a lot of sense when explaining why they want to join.
@jerry Maybe fedi sites should have like a #CombatArena area/hashtag. A proving ground, so to speak, for new accounts? Kind of like an adversarial open mic night?
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The amount of propaganda bots trying to sign up lately is bonkers. The fediverse feels like it’s becoming a battleground for information warfare. Be safe out there
@jerry I’ve been noticing that the firehose feeds have been feeling increasingly botty. Feed/Follow curation is more important than ever.
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The amount of propaganda bots trying to sign up lately is bonkers. The fediverse feels like it’s becoming a battleground for information warfare. Be safe out there
I remember when AOL did its "Eternal September" to the internet back in the 1990's. It is absolutely intentional to destroy existing communities and replace that structure with one they have brutal control.
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The amount of propaganda bots trying to sign up lately is bonkers. The fediverse feels like it’s becoming a battleground for information warfare. Be safe out there
@jerry There could be ten thousands of propaganda bots blasting away at their cold hearts content and most streams wouldn’t blip. Just your poor servers would have to toil.
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The amount of propaganda bots trying to sign up lately is bonkers. The fediverse feels like it’s becoming a battleground for information warfare. Be safe out there
@jerry It's nice that we can just ban em across many instances, and the instances that don't get their whole instance blocked. It seems the system is working well so far...I hope this comment doesn't age like milk one day though.
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@idlebrain one of the biggest challenges I’ve run into is defining where the line is between propaganda, and someone’s heartfelt genuine belief. Particularly if you consider that generally people who have a particular view will consider opposing views this propaganda.
@jerry @idlebrain propaganda comes two ways
one, directly from the source
two, from people who amplify
Fedi (the corners I'm in) has so far had very little of the latter because there's been so little of the former.
But bot accounts are sharply on the rise; now I get more bots than humans trying to follow me, when previously it was the reverse.
The landscape is changing and we'll have to adapt - I hope we beat the bad actor's pace with social-technical tools and improvements that let us collaboratively approach the problem literally more efficiently than they can pollute.
For example, this is what captchas used to do: they raised the cost and effort beyond the expected return, so doing more things that involved breaking captchas just lost money faster.
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@jerry REMEMBER WHY WE'RE HERE!
@macacator judging by your post we're here to meme!
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The amount of propaganda bots trying to sign up lately is bonkers. The fediverse feels like it’s becoming a battleground for information warfare. Be safe out there
@jerry I haven’t seen any of these, so thank you very much for all of your work to make that possible!
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@michaelgraaf @jerry True. I have a big challenge with bots 'signing up' to a wiki I look after, complete with email confirmation fulfillment. Dozens a day.
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@benroyce @wilbr @jairajdevadiga @idlebrain I argue that propaganda doesn’t have to be a lie to be propaganda. I am reminded of my time in China - the news there only covered accomplishments and successes in China and only covered problems and failures from western countries. None of it was a lie. But it was definitely propaganda. That is what we are seeing a lot of here. Plus, it’s often challenging to determine what is true or not without an army of fact checkers at our disposal.
@jerry @benroyce @wilbr @jairajdevadiga @idlebrain Yes, some of the propaganda accounts are really good. I saw some account that was stoking resentment against the UK government and it was also engaging with some normal content. But if you went to their profile page, sure enough all of the usual Kremlin talking points were there, up to and including MH17 denial. I can imagine that moderating this stuff is really hard because at first glance they just look like someone with really strong opinions.
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@jerry Maybe fedi sites should have like a #CombatArena area/hashtag. A proving ground, so to speak, for new accounts? Kind of like an adversarial open mic night?
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The amount of propaganda bots trying to sign up lately is bonkers. The fediverse feels like it’s becoming a battleground for information warfare. Be safe out there
@jerry Like I said before: any social network without strict *premoderation* vetting of new accounts will eventually become a trollbot network.
I was ignored, and here we are.
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@strypey But god's mercy be with us, if ever someone takes over the account of @catsalad or @briankrebs.
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@idlebrain one of the biggest challenges I’ve run into is defining where the line is between propaganda, and someone’s heartfelt genuine belief. Particularly if you consider that generally people who have a particular view will consider opposing views this propaganda.
@jerry @idlebrain and this is what makes you an awesome moderator! Keep up the good fight.
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The amount of propaganda bots trying to sign up lately is bonkers. The fediverse feels like it’s becoming a battleground for information warfare. Be safe out there
In addition, it seems to me that there's at least one instance whose only purpose is hosting bot or troll accounts.
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The amount of propaganda bots trying to sign up lately is bonkers. The fediverse feels like it’s becoming a battleground for information warfare. Be safe out there
@jerry Rejoice, it means the Fediverse has arrived: it's now a platform worth attacking.
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