110

Be wary of spammy reposting bots (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 2 months ago by p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

45 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[-] TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 8 points 2 months ago

The thing is though is it's just spam content with no interaction. Even the people setting up the bots without interacting with the content they post.

And honestly, if they would just steal the content of the post and use a bit to repost that, I wouldn't have a problem with that. But it's all text and self posts. If it's articles, that's great.

Look at the ask reddit bot. It's just reposting valid questions some other bot is posting to reddit.

[-] p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 2 months ago

If it’s articles, that’s great.

If that's the case, they should, at the very least, mark themselves as a bot account. And even then, it's not really organic posting of articles. The bot didn't say "hey, I really like the content of this article, so I'm going to re-post it on Lemmy". I tend to post a lot of YouTube videos because I watched the video, liked the video, and thought others should watch it.

Not all of Reddit, Shitter, or YouTube needs to be re-posted on Lemmy.