2 Instances are being used for coordinated vote manipulation, and should be defederated. chinese.lol lemmy.doesnotexist.club

The instances being used are

lemmy.doesnotexist.club
chinese.lol

Here is an example of the coordinated downvoting https://hackertalks.com/post/8692093

Of course its a controversial user who got someone angry enough to automated downvoting @[email protected]

But you can see every post they make gets 53ish downvotes from these two instances, plus some organic ones after a few hours.

Current downvoting Accounts :::spoiler bot-list

A individual user airing their personal biases and manipulating lemmy isn't good for the community, regardless of how you feel about their target. This is a really bad thing (tm)

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Thank you for investigating
- Yeah, I was scrolling new and saw some science posts with 50 downvotes... and I couldnt figure out why people were so triggered... so I started digging.
  There are lots of gaslighting opportunities presented by social media.

This highlights one of the things that I saw as a benefit when I started on kbin: being able to see who the downvote fairies were. I know the discussion has been done to death on the Lemmy side, but as a user I found it interesting to be able to see this kind of info. For example, instead of just block/reporting the spammer, I could block their sock puppets that upvoted as well. (And did kbin.social have a lot of that towards the end. Oof.)
Thanks for digging into this.
- Lemmy currently allows mods to see downvotes, so they can fight brigading on top of admins
  
  Visibility is a good thing.
  
  You mean admins, right? I cannot see downvotes on the community I mod.
- There is some interesting area here, like a personalized vote score, based on others who vote similar to you, giving them more weight then people you never agree with.
  net-net I think open votes make for better neighbors.
  
  PieFed has some interesting thoughts along these lines.
  I actively expect to never see such a thing in Lemmy though.
- I never realized that was a kbin only thing. I just assumed my instance/mbin blocked that feature.

Not sure if this community was the best place to post this, but yeah, that seems like a bad thing. Thanks for pointing it out. I do find it funny how most of the bot names follow the AdjectiveNounNumber format.
Lemmings of all instances, you may want to let your local admins know of this potential issue.
Here's a link to the megathread of support/meta communities for each instance: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/40519876
You should be able to find your instance's support/meta community in the list and cross-post OP's post to it.
- At this point I would probably just link this post on the Lemmy Defense HQ Matrix chat, most of the admins are there
  
  WTF did you just call me?
- I was trying to think of the right community for this... its not fedidrama, I want to target moderators and admins... is there a better community?
  
  We need a lemmyadmin community.

The attacker is the admin of these two instances. Both instances have their registrations closed.
- When I look, both have open registrations and don't even have a captcha? You see registrations as closed?
  
  It could be that Fediseer is outdated. I looked at the instance's fediseer page.
  https://gui.fediseer.com/instances/detail/chinese.lol
  https://gui.fediseer.com/instances/detail/lemmy.doesnotexist.club
  Edit: Their registrations are indeed open. Perhaps they opened it just now?
  Though it is also suspicious why the owner leaves the registrations open, requires no captcha, no approval nor any email confirmation, and the admin of lemmy.doesnotexist.club has been inactive since their account creation. Seems suspicious to me.
- .lol

The list of accounts is helpful. I’m going to copy+paste an idea that I had suggested elsewhere previously that someone with the means to achieve could set up to help fight these bot/astro-turf accounts:
If feasible, I think the best option would be an instance that functions similarly to how Reddit’s now defunct r/BotDefense operated and instances which want to filter out bots would federate with that. Essentially, if there is an account that is suspect of being a bot, users could submit that account to this bot defense server and an automated system would flag obvious bots whereas less obvious bots would have to be inspected manually by informed admins/mods of the server. This flagging would signal to the federated servers to ban these suspect/confirmed bot accounts. This instance would also be able to flag when a particular server is being overrun by bots and advise other servers to temporarily defederate.
There are some other ideas in that comment too, but this one is the most relevant.

lemmy . doesnotexist . club is where all those Nicole pictures are linked from for some reason.

Great work. It doesn’t matter who the target is this time (pretty sure I blocked them every time they popped up with a new account). This kind of shit should not be tolerated at all.

what does defederated mean?
like trusted instance admins to block untrusted ones (like the ones in the post) from showing all content/interactions on the trusted instance so users dont interact with them - like server block?
- Yep, exactly that. It's a little more complex, thus the different term (defederation), but from user-perspective it's exactly that: a server block.

@[email protected]
- Thanks

Current federation status:
https://defed.xyz/check?name=chinese.lol&software=lemmy
https://defed.xyz/check?name=lemmy.doesnotexist.club&software=lemmy
- @[email protected] I think this is something you should look at as SJW is under the federated list
- Right now the second link returns errors. Probably that instance is down.

Men. Tough. I agree it shouldn't be allowed, but I can't find a shred of sympathy for Nazis.

54 comments