Hi just a heads up. Check out this post: https://sh.itjust.works/post/37758799

It got so many upvotes in a such a short time I checked out its activity from an mbin instance. And most of these upvotes are coming from sh.itjust.works accounts which were all created 2 months ago, most on 2/16, and have never posted/commented. There was a similar post in the lemmy.world/c/world community linking to the same website and having a similarly high number of upvotes within minutes, but that post seems to be gone now.

  • MrKaplan@lemmy.worldEnglish
    15·
    20 days ago

    thanks for flagging this, i just banned 346 accounts involved in this scheme from lemmy.world :|

    (unbanned at the time of creating the report) accounts posting links to the same domain:

    • 4x sh.itjust.works
    • 2x ani.social
    • 1x thelemmy.club
    • 1x lemmy.ca

    accounts i’m highly confident were involved in vote manipulation here:

    • 172x sh.itjust.works
    • 22x ttrpg.network
    • 21x lemmings.world
    • 20x discuss.online (banned by me)
    • 19x lemmy.wtf
    • 18x lemmy.myserv.one
    • 18x leminal.space
    • 18x ani.social
    • 16x endlesstalk.org
    • 7x lemmy.ca
    • 4x lemy.lol
    • 1x toast.ooo
    • 1x startrek.website
    • 1x lemm.ee
    • farcaster@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      9·
      20 days ago

      Thanks for taking action! That’s a pretty crazy number of accounts to set up for what appears like promoting a few bland articles from a bland AI-generated website.

      • Universal Monk@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        2·
        10 days ago

        The bot creators were probably just testing the waters to make sure it works. I’ve been a victim of vote-manipulation bots; they downvote attacked me. So glad to see people are trying to get a handle on this.

    • chrisbit@leminal.spaceEnglish
      9·
      20 days ago

      Really appreciate the effort that went into compiling this. Those leminal.space accounts have been banned.

    • FundMECFS@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      4·
      20 days ago

      Wow that looks productive. I’m assuming you can’t share the methodology for linking these accounts to help combat this stuff but I’m very curious if that isn’t an issue.

      • MrKaplan@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5·
        20 days ago

        essentially start by identifying the accounts posting links to the domain in question, then analyze the voting behavior of the accounts upvoting these posts. you can start by sorting out accounts that have legitimate activity and then narrow it down further and find common patterns that only apply to these accounts.

        most of them were also created in similar time frames.

        edit:

        to extend on this, once you have something to go on with it’s fairly easy. the hard part is finding something that applies in a more generic way to identify this happening before someone else discovers unusual voting patterns and reports them.

    • Universal Monk@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      2·
      10 days ago

      Thanks for this! I am noticing more and more vote manipulation bots on Lemmy. Annoying af, so you’re awesome for researching that!