Does anyone else notice an uptick of extreme troll accounts?

ettyblatant@lemmy.world to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 419 points –

I swear, every time most of the time I see someone being particularly rude, ignorant, and inappropriate on a post (usually political in origin, or they swing it to being political) I click on their profile and see it has been created that same day.

They are only there to sow discord. Only to piss people off. Idk if we can just report them (for what?) but I'd like to try exposing them before responding and interacting..

I am guilty of gobbling up the bait. I've started looking at profiles of people that piss me off exceptionally and noticed they're burner bot loser accounts.

I guess i just want to say I've noticed it!

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Voyager has a setting to show a baby emoji next to the name of a user if their account is less than a month old and an account age. Probably one of the best features I've ever seen for immediately recognizing troll accounts.

There's already an issue on lemmy-ui for it.

Love this comment from that GitHub page...

This is urgently needed for the upcoming elections.

The only problem though is a lot of time astroturfers/bots create accounts and then just let them sit idle for 6-9 months before using them.

Maybe you could combat that by deleting inactive accounts that seemed to never have been used.

But they can get around that. It's a never ending battle against that kind of stuff.

Yeah exactly.

The filtering would had to be more sophisticated, instead of an age by date, maybe an age by number of posts within an amount of time, etc.

But astroturfers/bots can work with that too, to a certain extent.

nice. would love something like that on a web interface.

Voyager started as a progressive web app. vger.app. I prefer it to Lemmy’s interface even on computer.

I’m a big dumb. I’ve been using the Voyager app for a while and knew about the web app but never clicked I could use that on desktop.

For now, because Lemmy is relatively new. There's a reason many bot farms run accounts that are unassuming, "normal" people. Accounts that are established have value. They can then sell those accounts to another group who needs to sew discord. The older Lemmy is, the less useful the new account icon will be.

I find at least one commenter with a new account on almost every post with more than 5 comments.

They tend to be negative.

Think I'm going to start welcoming them to Lemmy, note their activity to date, and ask them nicely what might have brought them to join. (If they are real, glad to have them, but I have found most Lemmy members came here from Reddit, not to make accounts to post in News or Politics or such places trolls would like.)

Until Lemmy updates to identify new accounts ala Voyager, I think that would be helpful to inform other users they may be talking to a troll.

There are approximately 433k accounts but only 48k Monthly Active Users.

It's hard to believe that many of posts and comments are often the newest accounts, and though they will change tactics to using older accounts, at least it's more work for them.

I recommend others do the same.

So, now that you spend half your time on Lemmy being a narc, have you considered moving on to actually contributing meaningful comments and content, or are you content with just being a stool-pigeon that harasses new users?

(Checks your comment history)

Ah, so just the same comment over and over again for weeks on end. Fucking spammer...

Hey look, a new very active account, talking shit about... Hmmm....

Nazis, trump, cops, Russians, gays, etc!

Yeah, people like you are why I point it out new accounts.

And from the way you communicate rudely here, to me for saying "Welcome" to new members, illustrates a great point that you don't seem to be someone worth talking to, likely by anyone.

Have a great day, and looking forward to Welcoming your next alt.

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