2mo ago

We are seeing some vote manipulation

We had a couple of reports today of vote manipulation happening in the Australia community. After investigating, I'm seeing a trend:

https://aussie.zone/post/21203876
https://aussie.zone/post/21124048
https://aussie.zone/post/21194319
https://aussie.zone/post/21130833

The votes in all these posts look like this. In this example, only two of the downvotes look legitimate. The rest are coming from three instances that don't appear to be real Lemmy sites. One of them doesn't even resolve.

33 comments

I've added jenny.nya.pub, fun.with.kyun.li, and red.computersforpeace.net to our instance blocklist.
Please don't scare me with a title like that so soon after an election.
- That sort of vote manipulation wouldn't be posted to this community. 😄
  I'm a little surprised at how many people have seen this post. More people subscribe to Meta/browse Local than I would have guessed. Whichever it is, I love how engaged our users are in the health of the instance. You guys are great!
- Right I was worried they would demand a redo and it might not go so well
Wait, mods can see which member downvotes a post?
- Anybody can see it. The info is very lightly hidden, and available to anybody with an ounce of interest.
- Full disclosure: I honestly thought everyone could. 😆
- Mods can see all votes in communities that they mod, up and down.
  Admins can (I believe) see all votes, full stop.
  
  Admins can (I believe) see all votes, full stop
  This is correct, with the caveat that the votes must have federated with the admin's instance (so other instances need a user to be subscribed to the community in question, and votes can take time to flow through).
Apparently these were fly-by-night operations, because now funwithkyunli appears to be an unconfigured Nginx server, and jennynyapub & redcomputersforpeacenet don’t even have DNS addresses.
Geez, putting me on blast a bit 😆
For the record, I only downvoted ~~two~~ three of the linked posts (once each!)
- You are absolutely allowed to downvote anything you'd like to see less of. Yours was one of the two legitimate downvotes I was speaking of.
- Nothing is secret on the internet these days.
Hey, I noticed this, this morning on my instance. They're operating out of at least 3 1 day old instances mixed in with a few legitimate older accounts on other instances. We've been discussing it on the Lemmy HQ Matrix.
It seems like this Aussie.Zone member might be involved in perpetrating it as well @eureka@aussie.zone as they flagged as matching the same vote waves on multiple posts.
- Nah, Eureka is legit. He just doesn't think news should be in Australia. And that's perfectly fine. There may come a time where we are getting enough content that we'll want to introduce that as a rule.
  
  Similar reason for Zero_Gravitas?
  I hope so, i's a bit spun out when i saw them both on this list.
  
  If it's Australian related news it should be in my opinion
  
  Like I said, they popped up in the same vote manipulation against select users as those other accounts did. Make of it what you will.
- Oof that's a username thst whistles at high pitch
  
  What, @eureka? 'Eureka' isn't a right-wing dogwhistle, if that's what you mean. @eureka is a good leftist - the red variant of the flag for their avatar is a bit of a giveaway.
  Right-wingers and racists who uses the Eureka flag (any colour) can get fucked, it's a union flag.
What a loser. Great to see this kind of thing gets discovered, it was one of my concerns when joining Lemmy (and one of my motivations for leaving sites like reddit).
Hmm, looks suss.
I read a comment somewhere recently that the upvotes and downvotes don't really do anything on Lemmy.
If thats the case, is their seeming coordination for downvoting having a meaningful effect?
- Votes 100% matter in Lemmy. It certainly affects the 'hot' sort type.
  
  It affects literally every sort type except new
- There are no karma totals like on Reddit but people still do take fake internet points seriously.
  With that being said some instances will remove the option to down vote to "prevent" this kind of thing.
  
  I don't take fake internet points seriously! Who would do that!
  I've barely even noticed that both the people who have replied to my comment have a higher upvote total than me.
  Nope, i don't care at all!
  Not on iota!
  Okay, maybe a little.. /j :p
Is it possible to have code to automatically block fake instances that don't resolve?
classic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publicity_Department_of_the_Chinese_Communist_Party

33 comments