Lately, I’ve recognized many posts from very new accounts here, usually younger than a day. They post a couple of news articles and are never to be seen again.
I’ve checked this communitiy’s modlog and many new accounts get banned relatively quickly. Their behaviour is eerily similar, even their profile pictures have similar styles, so it seems to be the same origin.
Out of curiosity, is there some lore I missed?
More seriously, I think we users in this community maybe should be more conscious about this and stop interacting with posts from these profiles.
Dunno if my post makes any sense, it’s just something weird I noticed and wanted to say something about.
Is Lemmy important enough to attract bots with malicious political intentions? A victory for us.
On a more serious note, I don’t know of any truly effective way to prevent that beyond sheer, hard work and restraint, and even then it’s never easy to distinguish bad intention of legitimate dissenting opinions.
It’s not even as if they express opinions. They only post links (usually of articles). 10 to 30 of them before abandoning the accounts. Why the throwaway accounts?
Exactly, most bonafide nornal new users , usually reacts in several communities within the 1 -2 weeks minimum, before they make a post.
Happy to hear @Emopunker@feddit.org you guys are keeping an eye on this finally. Its been going on for a while, and I have reported this issue to you on occasion the last weeks especially.
These user(s) move to other communities/instances once they get to banned too often in one. Then Usually, after some weeks or a month they circle back to the first, and so on.
As community users, we can report those clear cut post & run users and don’t react to their post to (maybe) discourage them. Their profile and behiavour is pretty obvious, so they can be recognised. At the same time, I encourage the community to be welcoming to bonafide new users ofcourse.
On another matter, will you consider informing the community after you made adjustments or updates to the workings of the Rules ( like recently with the archive. today) for example? I had posted this question some days ago. thnaks
When we come to a decision on it, we will inform the users about it.
Great, tnx
Are the news articles paywalled/ad supported/propagandistic?
Perhaps someone just trying to get more views to those sites?
Then why does has the person abandoned dozens of accounts for the past few months instead of consistently posting on the same account?
It has been an issue since at least two months ago first starting on lemmy.world
Because they know they are being disingenuous and jump to another account before someone takes an action against that account.
Not sure but maybe chaos and confusion is one of their ban evading tactic.
Might even be just multiple people getting paid a bit, by said news sites.
Maybe it is turning out to be cheaper for the news site owners than ads on Google etc.
In Germany, we used to put an ASCII art fish for trolls, because they were troll-fishing:
That was advising others not to react to them/ Maybe we should use something similar for clanker-bots ?
Anything is game to push once narrative
We all have a narrative and try to convince others; that’s what dialogue in forums is all about. The difference is whether it’s done in good faith, trying to debate, learn and share, or in bad faith, diverting, deceiving and pushing misleading debates to promote hidden ideas.
It is not always easy to distinguish one from another, and organized groups take advantage of that.
They are not writing any comments though and if then it is only posting links.
Or bots are just that cheap.