• Dave@lemmy.nz
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      1 year ago

      I’m an instance admin and see heaps of the same stuff being posted. Pretty sure it’s one lonely troll not lots of people. Even in this thread, it’s all one user account not lots of different people, but we see the same stuff posted across lots of brand new accounts in a very similar way.

      • yagav50850@sh.itjust.worksOP
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        1 year ago

        Makes sense. Even then a lot of the troll’s comments are upvoted by a few people. There are definitely a few people here who share the troll’s extreme opinions. Thanks for doing your part in removing all these bullshit. I wish lemmy had a way to block account creation by IP addresses. That might stop trolls from making dozens of alt accounts.

        • Dave@lemmy.nz
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          1 year ago

          We very often see the same username created across many instances, it’s very easy to do and Lemmy has no protections against it. Plus, there are no protections against creating multiple accounts to upvote your own posts (don’t get any ideas 😆). IP blocks wouldn’t work as instances are entirely independent, so there is no sharing of IP info across different instances.

          Currently there is at least some level of coordination across instances, though, such as Lemmy.world’s Defense HQ, where instance admins can share info about spammers/trolls so we don’t have to wait for a report from one of our own users. There’s also Fediseer, but this protects against spam instances not spam accounts on mainstream instances.

          • Anbalsilfer@sopuli.xyz
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            1 year ago

            We very often see the same username created across many instances

            Guilty as charged. I’ll say though, there are several legitimate reasons why one might want to do this. I personally use it as a substitute for Reddit’s multireddit feature, by grouping community subscriptions across different instances by theme. As long as users use the same username across instances I don’t think this practice should be automatically regarded as an attempt to sockpuppet. It that was the goal, the accounts would definitely not be using the same username across all the instances.

            • taladar@sh.itjust.works
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              1 year ago

              Personally I have accounts on multiple instances because I wanted to make communities in different languages and some instances focus a lot more on one language than others and also because the SFW instances defederated the NSFW ones. I do not really interact with the same posts though.

            • Dave@lemmy.nz
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              1 year ago

              I didn’t intend to imply that by using the same username across instances you were breaking some sort of rule. Different instances have different moderation policies, different federation policies, and different intents. Having multiple accounts in good faith should not be an issue and was not what I was trying to imply.

              Rather, the intention was to show that we know bad actors do this with nefarious intent. Here’s an example (they show zero comments as they have been banned with content removed - also I think these ones only had posts not comments anyway):

              lemmy search showing many search results for the same name across many instances indicating escort services

          • dan@upvote.au
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            1 year ago

            there are no protections against creating multiple accounts to upvote your own posts

            They don’t even have to be real accounts. Lemmy uses the ActivityPub protocol, and nothing’s stopping someone from creating an ActivityPub server that federates with a Lemmy instance and spams upvotes from randomly-generated usernames. The server could just pretend that every username is a valid one.

            Of course, I think something like that would be defederated pretty quickly.

            • Dave@lemmy.nz
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              1 year ago

              Yes, there’s fediseer that can help with that sort of thing. However, I think if it wasn’t spam, it may not get noticed as quick as you’d think. Create a lemmy.world account, post a meme, and use your special server to throw 50 or 100 upvotes at it, and probably no one would realise.

        • Churbleyimyam@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          The problem is that would also ban anyone else who might be on the same IP. VPN, Tor exit node, public WiFi etc. Nothing beats a well staffed moderation team and other users willing to report abuse IMO.

    • andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      Indians are present in big numbers on reddit and other websites due to how populated India is, how english is popular there and that they aren’t contained in national platforms like their chinese neighbors. It makes them noticeable for bigots to single them out and target. Just because they want someone to hate and laugh at to up their self-esteem.

      • satan@r.nf
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        1 year ago

        riiiight it’s not like they use their population to push lies, distort the truth and not push their extreme caste hatred elsewhere.

        It makes them noticeable for bigots to single them out and target.

        it’s actually the opposite. one indian guy pushes a lie that puts india in a better light and almost every indian votes the post or comment to the top. anyone pointing out the truth is buried by the nationalistic brigade.

        Racism is bad, using the ignorant populace to push lies is bad too.

        • andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          Do you think the government itself is involved here, or is it just volunteers? Did it occur to fediverse? I think here you are talking about reddit, right?

          I’m not Indian and all I’ve seen lately are news about how bad their ecological and ethnic situations under Modi are. I’ve heard of something named like r/chodi, but mostly from drama write-ups. What’s the scale of brigading we are talking about?

    • ChiwaWithMujicanoHat@mujico.org
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      1 year ago

      I think it’s due to the stereotypes and the bad experiences, I’ve had pretty bad experiences with indians in gaming (racist, annoying, begging) and work (incompetent, corrupt, etc), but I’ve also seen that from other people with different backgrounds, more importantly though is that I’ve also seen some amazing tutorials in YouTube from Indian peeps and I’ve also found some great repos from Indian devs as well.

    • agame@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Probably trolls looking for attention and engagement. But not being aware that their comments does hurt someone.