Be wary of spammy reposting bots

2 months ago by P03 Locke to c/fediverse

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/71708296

I've noticed quite a few top posters that are using LLMs or other software to repost news links and images, probably from Reddit, onto a bunch of specific forums. They don't identify as bot accounts, but they are fairly easy to spot because they are posting a steady stream of posts, around 2-3 posts an hour, 24/7. No sleep periods, just constant posts, at an unnatural rate.

Here's a few examples I've found:

@Grumpus_Maximus@thelemmy.club - Joined 2 months ago, 1.69K posts, sole moderator of Build A PC Sales@lemmy.world, steady stream of posts without sleeping, only posts on 4 different forums

@sanitation@lemmy.today - Joined 2 months ago, 1.3K posts, steady stream of posts without sleeping, only posts on 5-6 different forums

@beep@piefed.world - Joined 3 months ago, 2K posts, moderator of 15 different forums only on piefed.world, also a hidden moderator of Beep—Meta@piefed.world (yes, with an emdash) with zero posts and zero users, seems to try to evade detection by having some posting breaks in-between

Keep an eye on these kind of posters, and report them when you see them.

davel 10 points 2 months ago

All three of those were banned a month or two ago on lemmy.ml.

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Maeve 3 points a month ago

Cavoy

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dessalines 8 points 2 months ago

Looks like they've all already been banned here a while ago. Thanks for the heads up.

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bilb 5 points 2 months ago

Is the exact problem here that they do not self-identify as automated accounts, or are automated posters a problem per se?

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MachineFab812 3 points 2 months ago

Auto-repost-bots are far from anything new. Did you check with the mods of the communities in question?

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explorator_1317 0 points 8 days ago

I've started to notice this as well. @supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz makes up most of the post traffic on the mander.xyz communities, and the account posts multiple times an hour, almost constantly. They post scientific articles, which while topically relevant, are spam-y.

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supersquirrel 1 point 7 days ago

How so?

I am a human posting, there is nothing automated about what I do.

I always try to post high quality stuff and I encourage you to contribute!

I want more interesting science news here that isn't superficial, I want science news that links right to papers encouraging people to open them up and poke around. This is why I post so much to mander.xyz, I am tired of waiting for that future.

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explorator_1317 2 points 5 days ago

Yeah sorry, I had assumed your posts were automated since they were so constant and whenever I looked at your profile it seemed like all that was there was an endless stream of article posts. After making the above comment though, I looked again and saw breaks and comments for the first time, realized my mistake, and then deleted my post.

EDIT: I think I deleted my post. It looks deleted to me, but maybe it doesn't look deleted from other instances? I apologize again.

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