2y ago

Proof that bots are manipulating content

See THIS POST

Notice- the 2,000 upvotes?

https://gist.github.com/XtremeOwnageDotCom/19422927a5225228c53517652847a76b

It's mostly bot traffic.

Important Note

The OP of that post did admit, to purposely using bots for that demonstration.

I am not making this post, specifically for that post. Rather- we need to collectively organize, and find a method.

Defederation is a nuke from orbit approach, which WILL cause more harm then good, over the long run.

Having admins proactively monitor their content and communities helps- as does enabling new user approvals, captchas, email verification, etc. But, this does not solve the problem.

The REAL problem

But, the real problem- The fediverse is so open, there is NOTHING stopping dedicated bot owners and spammers from...

Creating new instances for hosting bots, and then federating with other servers. (Everything can be fully automated to completely spin up a new instance, in UNDER 15 seconds)
Hiring kids in africa and india to create accounts for 2 cents an hour. NEWS POST 1 POST TWO
Lemmy is EXTREMELY trusting. For example, go look at the stats for my instance online.... (lemmyonline.com) I can assure you, I don't have 30k users and 1.2 million comments.
There is no built-in "real-time" methods for admins via the UI to identify suspicious activity from their users, I am only able to fetch this data directly from the database. I don't think it is even exposed through the rest api.

What can happen if we don't identify a solution.

We know meta wants to infiltrate the fediverse. We know reddits wants the fediverse to fail.

If, a single user, with limited technical resources can manipulate that content, as was proven above-

What is going to happen when big-corpo wants to swing their fist around?

Edits

Removed most of the images containing instances. Some of those issues have already been taken care of. As well, I don't want to distract from the ACTUAL problem.
Cleaned up post.

143 comments

@ruud@lemmy.world (lemmy.world)
@nutomic@lemmy.ml (lemmy.ml)
@TheDude@sh.itjust.works (sh.itjust.works)
@db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com (dbzer0)
What, corrective courses of action shall we seek?
I sent messages to these users, notifying them to come to this thread.
https://startrek.website/u/ValueSubtracted (startek.website)
https://oceanbreeze.earth/u/windocean (oceanbreeze.earth)
https://normalcity.life/u/EuphoricPenguin22 (normalcity.life)
I blocked / defederated these instances:
https://lemmy.dekay.se/ (appears to just be a spambot server)
- Just wanted to point out that according to your stats, unless I don't understand them well, only 26 bots come from lemmy.world (which has open sign-ups, and uses the "easy to break" (/s) captcha) and 16 from lemmy.ml (which doesn't have open sign-ups and relies on manual approvals).
  For some perspective, lemmy.world has almost 48k users right now. Speaking of "corrective action" is a bit of a stretch IMO.
  
  This post isn't about lemmy.world, nor am I blaming lemmy.world!
  I am trying to drag in the admins of the big instances, to come up with a collective plan to address this issue.
  There isn't a single instance causing this problems. The bots are distributed amongst normal users, in normal instances.
  WIth- the exception of a instance or two with nothing but bot traffic.
- Thanks will keep an eye on this thread.
- It looks like the OP is responsible for the upvote bots (inferred from his edit?). Maybe to prove the original point?
  
  That is correct- Please see my revised post. I removed lots of the data and parts, to help point out the bigger problem we need to solve.
  
  That is likely true- and my goal of this post, isn't to look at that one post.
  Its to discuss what sorts of solutions we can apply to help squad this problem.
  Ideally, solutions that doesn't involve mass-defederation.
- You may also want to block lemmit.online
  
  Eh- its not really a spam instance.
  They are very straightforward with what their instance does- It crossposts reddit to lemmy, in that instance's communities.
  In that case, its as simple as don't subscribe to it. Don't subscribe, and it won't popup on your feed.
  
  I hope you mean a user can block it if they don't want it.
  Generally though: I don't understand this logic. Like I want content, I subscribe over there to pull some content from reddit. Not all bots are bad.
  It's kind of weird how the fediverse kind of seems like a bubble of anti bot, anti big companies and constant self-political squabbles.
  
  last I checked, they use a single bot to repost communities from reddit. meaning that you can just block that single user and get rid of all the lemmy.online content that's in your feed.
I dont have much to add other than I am an experienced admin and was dismayed at how vulnerable Lemmy is. Having an option to have open registrations with no checks is not great. No serious platform would allow that.
I dont know of a bulletproof way to weed put the bad actors, but a voting system that Lemmy can leverage, with a minimum reputation in order to stay federated might work. This would require some changes that I'm not sure the devs can or would make. Without any protection in place, people will get frustrated and abandon Lemmy. I would.
- When I made a post saying that 90% (now ~95%) of accounts on lemmy are bots the amount of people saying that there's no proof and/or saying to me that there's a lot of people joining from reddit right now was astonishing.
  Edit: one person said me that noone would make 1.6mln bots when there are only 150k-200k users on the platform, like WTF.
  
  Another thing is people are likely pre-creating bot accounts and then sitting in them in case additional protections are created...
  The problem is, these accounts look to us just like any new user, lurking around getting a feel for the place - there's no way to distinguish them until they start this bots acting in some fashion
- bye bye
- that's a problem with democracy itself as a concept
Why can't we just have nice things?
The place feels different today than it did just a couple of days ago, and it positively reeks of bots.
I'm seeing far fewer original posts and far more links to karma-farmer quality pabulum, all of which pretty much instantly somehow get hundreds of upvotes.
The bots are here. And they're circlejerking.
- Yup. And, I would bet money, it will get progressively worse, unless steps are taken to prevent it.
  
  Theres some that aren't just money.
  There are bots that mirror content from Reddit, just linking to them.
  I've seen posts that are 3 or 4 crossposts (between community/instances) deep.
  I want content.
  I don't want bot content
- Honestly to me it's the same. If anything it seems like less content but idk.
Honestly, I’m interested to see how the federation handles this problem. Thank you for all the attention you’re bringing to it.
My fear is that we might overcorrect by becoming too defederation-happy, which is a fear it seems that you share. However I disagree with your assertion that the federation model is more risky than conventional Reddit-like models. Instance owners have just as many tools (more, in fact) as Reddit does to combat bots on their instance. Plus we have the nuke-from-orbit defederation option.
Since it seems like most of these bots are coming from established instances (rather than spoofing their own), I agree with you that the right approach seems to be for instance mods to maintain stricter signups (captcha, email verification, application, or other original methods). My hope is that federation will naturally lead to a “survival of the fittest” where more bot-ridden instances will copy the methods of the less bot-ridden instances.
I think an instance should only consider defederation if it’s already being plagued by bot interference from a particular instance. I don’t think defederation should be a pre-emptive action.
- Honestly, I’m interested to see how the federation handles this problem.
  Ditto. Perhaps we're going to see a new solution for an old problem.
There is no built-in “real-time” methods for admins via the UI to identify suspicious activity from their users, I am only able to fetch this data directly from the database. I don’t think it is even exposed through the rest api.
The people doing the development seem to have zero concern that their all the major servers are crashing with nginx 500 errors on their front page under routine moderate loads, nothing close to a major website. There is no concern to alert operators of internal federation failures, etc.
I am only able to fetch this data directly from the database.
I too had to resort to this, and published an open source tool - primitive and non-elegant, to try and get something out there for server operators: !lemmy_helper@lemmy.ml
- Thanks, I'll take a look at that one.
  
  I you have SQL statements to share, please do. Ill toss them into the app.
- Computers are cheaper and better at solving Captchas than humans atm
  This is hilarious
  
  Hilarious and true
I noticellot of instances which were flooded with bots due to the open registration. I have most of them degenerated for this reason.
- We need a better solution for this, rather then mass-bulk defederation.
  In my opinion- that is going to greatly slowdown the spread and influence of this platform. Also IMO- I think these bots are purposely TRYING to get instances to defederate from each other.
  Meta is pushing its "fediverse" thing. Reddit, is trying to squash the fediverse. Honestly, it makes perfect sense that we have bots trying to upvote the idea of getting instances to defederate each other.
  Once- everything is defederated- lots of communities will start to fall apart.
  
  I agree. This is why I started the Fediseer which makes it easy for any instance to be marked as safe through human review. If people cooperate on this, we can add all good instances, no matter how small, while spammers won't be able to easily spin up new instances and just spam.
  
  The solution is to choose servers with admins who are enabling bot protections.
  If admins are not using methods to dissuade bot signups, then they're not keeping their site clean for their users. They're being a bad admin.
  If they're not protecting their site against bots, they're also not protecting the network against hosts. That makes them bad denizens of the Fediverse, and the rest of us should take action to protect the network.
  And that means cutting ties with those who endanger it.
  
  Is this finally an application for a Blockchain?
  Some sort of decentralised registry of instance reputation?
- *defederated, I think?
  
  Defenestrated.
Hello. The post you mentioned was made as a warning, to prove a point. That the fediverse is currently extremely vulnerable to bots.
user 'alert', made the post then upvoted with his bots. To prove how easy it was to manipulate traffic, even without funding.
see:
https://kbin.social/m/lemmy@lemmy.ml/t/79888/Protect-Moderate-Purge-Your-Sever
It's proof that anyone could easily manipulate content unless instance owners take the bot issue seriously.
- Absolutely. Me and a couple of others have been warning against this for a week now.
- I did update my post, shortly before you posted this, to include that- as well as- removing a lot of the data for individual instances as it derives from the point / problem I am trying to identify.
  The data, however, is quite valuable in exposing that this WILL be a problem for us, especially if we do not identify a solution for it.
Does appear, a few of these are common hosts though-
lemmy.dekay.se, bbs.darkswitch.net. normalcity.life. etc.
Lol well it was fun while it lasted! Man there are some really greedy assholes out there.
- Well- I have not seen much evidence that supports this is actively being used... yet.
  Just- bringing more attention to how easy it is to do.
Reposting this in comment from a reply elsewhere in the thread.
If anything there should be SOME centralization that allows other (known, somehow verified) instances to vote to disallow spammy instances from federating. In some way that couldn't be abused. This may lead to a fork down the road (think BTC vs BCH) due to community disagreements but I don't really see any other way this doesn't become an absolute spamfest. As it stands now one server admin could spamfest their own server with their own spam, and once it starts federating EVERYONE gets flooded. This also easily creates a DoS of the system.
Asking instance admins to require CAPTCHA or whatever to defeat spam doesn't work when the instance admins are the ones creating spam servers to spam the federation.
- I'm working to build a simple GUI around db0's project.
  Its simple enough- allows instance owners to vet out other instances.
  Edit-
  @nohbdyuno@sh.itjust.works you going to continue just blindly downvoting everything? lol.
@xtremeownage
I think that one of the most difficult things to deal with more common bots, spamming, reposting, etc.
Is that parsing all the commentary and dealing with it on a service wide level is really hard to do, in terms of computing power and sheer volume of content. Seems to me that do this on an instance level with user numbers in the 10's of thousands is a heck of a lot more reasonable than doing it on a 10's of millions of users service.
What I'm getting at is that this really seems like something that could (maybe even should) be built into the instance moderation tools, at least some method of marking user activity as suspicious for further investigation by human admins/mods.
We're really operating on the assumption that people spinning up instances are acting in good faith, until they prove that they aren't, I think the first step is giving good faith actors the tools to moderate effectively, then worrying about bad faith admins.
- I think the first step is giving good faith actors the tools to moderate effectively, then worrying about bad faith admins.
  I agree with this 110%
I really hope that some researchers will get interested into this and develop some cool solutions to this. Maybe we are lucky and they even implement them into Lemmy.
- I agree, I think the data is easily there to perform the proper analysis, and there are enough hooks in the platform to apply the results.
If Twitter can't avoid bots how will the fediverse avoid it, using some captcha maybe?
- The only thing I can think of, which would probably be wildly unpopular, is ID checking.
  Or perhaps SMS based 2FA on each account, which needs to be reconfirmed monthly?
  Perhaps also rate limiting per account.
  
  That feel pretty much the only way you can easily filter bot out.
  The best ID to check would be a government ID or a bank account ID. The gov/bank are absolutely crazy about making sure that someone is really someone.
  Unfortunately, this is incompatible with anonymity, unless we trust the instance admin.
  I really like the SMS thing.
This is troubling.
At least we have the data though, hopefully these findings are useful for updating the Fediseer/Overseer so we can more easily detect bots
- I really wish we would have a good data scientist, or ML individual jump in this thread.
  I can easily dig through data, I can easily dig through code- but, someone who could perform intelligent anomaly detection would be a god-send right now.
  
  There are data scientist around and we are monitoring where this goes.
  Bigest problem I currently see is how to effectively share data but preserve privacy. Can this be solved without sharing emails and ip addresses or would that be necessary? Maybe securely hashing emails and ip addresses is enough, but that would hide some important data.
  Should that be shared only with trusted users?
  Can we create dataset where humans would identify bots and than share with larger community (like kaggle), to help us with ideas.
  There are options and will be built, just jt can not happen in few days. People are working non stop to fix (currently) more important issues.
  Be patient, collect the data and let's work on solution.
  And let's be nice to each others, we all have similar goals here.
the problem is that activity pub is dumb and bad
- This, isn't a problem specific to activity pub, lemmy, or any individual platform in general.
  Reddit faces this problem every day. Facebook faces this problem. Twitter faces this problem.
  They all do.
  And, each platform has to determine the best method for that platform to deal with this issue.
We need browser fingerprinting for this.
- Browser fingerprints are easy enough to block or mimic, though, at least for the solutions I've messed with. JavaScript based solutions in particular are tricky because of the privacy implications and the fact that decent privacy focused browsers are starting to block those things automatically.
- No.
  Fingerprinting is against the goals of Lemmy and privacy. Lemmy should be for the good of people.
  If anything there should be SOME centralization that allows other (known, somehow verified) instances to vote to allow/disallow spammy instances. In some way that couldn't be abused. This may lead to a fork down the road (think BTC vs BCH) due to community disagreements but I don't really see any other way this doesn't become an absolute spamfest. As it stands now one server admin could spamfest their own server with their own spam, and once it starts federating EVERYONE gets flooded. This also easily creates a DoS of the system.
  Asking instance admins to require CAPTCHA or whatever to defeat spam doesn't work when the instance admins are the ones creating spam servers to spam the federation.
  
  If anything there should be SOME centralization that allows other (known, somehow verified) instances to vote to allow/disallow spammy instances
  We are working on this currently. Stay tuned.
  Lemmy and privacy.
  I would be careful using both of those words in the same sentence. They ONLY private thing on this entire platform, is your email address, and your IP. If you post, comment, or vote on a public instance- that data is sent to every other subscribing instances.
  That being said- unless you volunteer information to lemmy, it doesn't know who you are.
  That also being said- I am against letting google handling data collection for lemmy.
Hey look, it's me in the picture! What a waste of my 15 minutes of fame
IMO long term Lemmy needs to move away from upvotes as a measure of interest and activity. That's too easy to manipulate.
Perhaps comment activity and interaction metrics would be better.
If you always had e-mail verification turned on then you can get rid of some of these junk sign-ups relatively easy, I wrote a guide for it here: https://lemdit.com/post/16430
From what I've seen, most of the bot sign-ups that are swelling instance User numbers wouldn't have passed e-mail verification. I think it was done mostly to prove a point, rather than an attempt to actually use those accounts.
Instances that didn't have e-mail verification turned on are in a much harder spot.
- I have a kubernetes cronjob, which automatically cleans those up every few days.
  Along- with one that cleans up the activity table.
- We are working on it. :-)
  https://fediseer.com/
  And, associated (work in progress) GUI. https://fediseer.kube.xtremeownage.com/instances/whitelisted
  (EXTREMELY... work in progress. Literally just got that set up a few hours ago... But, will continue to push changes, until we have something that is usable.)