A lot of these accounts have what appear to be randomly generated or LLM-assisted bios, and my current favourite is
"Farmer with a taste for cronut culture in Milwaukee"
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A lot of these accounts have what appear to be randomly generated or LLM-assisted bios, and my current favourite is
"Farmer with a taste for cronut culture in Milwaukee"
@iftas Well that sounds grade-A 'merican to me. Yeee-Haw.
@iftas Do you have that list in a csv file so individuals could add them to their personal blocklist?
@iftas I'm a moderator of the Italian instance mastodon.uno through @informapirata, and I noticed that one of the Russian bot accounts listed is attributed to the mastodon.uno instance.
The account in question was registered on January 12th and began to be active after more than a week. I personally reported it on January 21st and, as administrator @filippodb can confirm, I deactivated it using mastodon's freeze function.
At the same time, all posts published by that account were deleted, but obviously the messages (three in total) reshared by other accounts, messages that contained no problematic content, were not deleted.
The decision to deactivate it rather than suspend it was based on the fact that we were studying the Russian bot phenomenon to understand how often they attacked the deactivated profile, whether they connected automatically or manually, and whether the freeze function helped reduce subscriptions. And indeed, it did.
I would like to add that I personally continue to use this method to combat Russian bot registrations, even on the poliversity.it instance, which I personally manage. Following your report, I have added a silencing action to the freezing process, so that those accounts are not detected by your scraping system.
On mastodon.uno, however, for purely organizational reasons, we began directly suspending all accounts that still manage to bypass the blocks we've placed on the email addresses used to register.
Returning to the main point, I would like to point out that your report only reached us on April 30th, a full 90 days later, and that account had been rendered practically unusable. Your identification of the account was carried out through automated processing (scraping) and resulted in a now useless report because it was not linked to any content and to an account that was no longer usable. A report that was therefore completely rightfully not given priority.
The account was then permanently suspended on May 3rd, three days after your report.
Mastodon.uno is the largest Italian instance, with thousands of active users and dozens of registrations per day. Thanks to a staff of around twenty volunteer moderators, we can keep registrations open with virtually immediate processing times and extremely rapid decision-making.
We therefore ask you to remove the name of the bot that was no longer present in our instance from the list of Russian bots, which had been removed from our instance well before your report.
We believe it is not only unfair but also extremely damaging to our reputation that our instance, one of the most active in combating Russian botnets, should be lumped together with other instances that do not practice moderation at all, or that practice poor or incomplete moderation.
We look forward to hearing from you and thank you for your attention.
@informapirata@poliverso.org @informapirata@mastodon.uno @filippodb
>Your identification of the account was carried out through automated processing (scraping)
To be clear, I spend roughly two hours per day, every day, manually reviewing accounts, looking at over 150 instances. There is no scraping of any kind. Just me and my mouse.
I have two lists, the new one starting in April. Any accounts not suspended on the old list were brought forward to the new list, generating new reports for older accounts.
@iftas @informapirata@poliverso.org @informapirata @filippodb huge work. Thank you very much 🙏
@informapirata@poliverso.org @informapirata@mastodon.uno @filippodb
I do not see any active account on your service in our data, but if there is something you want me to specifically review, please DM me.
I want to emphasise that mastodon.uno is a stellar example of a well-moderated instance. The dedication of your volunteer staff is evident, and you have my complete respect for the proactive measures you take to keep the Fediverse safe.
@iftas Thank you very much for your kind words, and thank you as well for all the important work you are doing.
We truly appreciate the recognition of the effort our volunteer staff puts into moderation and community care.
We have always maintained a zero-tolerance policy toward Russian bots and Kremlin propaganda accounts, and we will continue to take proactive measures to keep the Fediverse safe, healthy, and welcoming for everyone. @informapirata@poliverso.org @informapirata
@informapirata@poliverso.org @informapirata@mastodon.uno @filippodb
Please understand that being listed does not equate to a failure in moderation; rather, it reflects the reality of being a target for these campaigns. Your transparency regarding the "freeze" strategy is in fact helpful context for those of us tracking these movements and activities.
@informapirata@poliverso.org @filippodb @iftas Finally, I'd like to add one of the many posts we've published in recent months (this one from mid-March), in which we inform our users about the specifics of Russian disinformation and the attacks we receive from their botnets. Just to show how sensitive we are to the problem.
@iftas @anewsocial doesn't seem to belong on this list
@ethergear @anewsocial it's just a general snapshot of the bot activity, copying and pasting whatever they come across in this instance.
(I've edited the image to blank out the OP, did not mean to infer any connection, I just took a random snapshot, didn't notice there were authentic accounts on the page)
