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Vote manipulation bots using sh.itjust.works? (lemmy.world)

submitted 2 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hi just a heads up. Check out this post: https://sh.itjust.works/post/37758799

It got so many upvotes in a such a short time I checked out its activity from an mbin instance. And most of these upvotes are coming from sh.itjust.works accounts which were all created 2 months ago, most on 2/16, and have never posted/commented. There was a similar post in the lemmy.world/c/world community linking to the same website and having a similarly high number of upvotes within minutes, but that post seems to be gone now.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 days ago (3 children)

thanks for flagging this, i just banned 346 accounts involved in this scheme from lemmy.world :|

(unbanned at the time of creating the report) accounts posting links to the same domain:

4x sh.itjust.works
2x ani.social
1x thelemmy.club
1x lemmy.ca

accounts i'm highly confident were involved in vote manipulation here:

172x sh.itjust.works
22x ttrpg.network
21x lemmings.world
20x discuss.online (banned by me)
19x lemmy.wtf
18x lemmy.myserv.one
18x leminal.space
18x ani.social
16x endlesstalk.org
7x lemmy.ca
4x lemy.lol
1x toast.ooo
1x startrek.website
1x lemm.ee

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 days ago

Really appreciate the effort that went into compiling this. Those leminal.space accounts have been banned.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 days ago

Thanks for taking action! That's a pretty crazy number of accounts to set up for what appears like promoting a few bland articles from a bland AI-generated website.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Wow that looks productive. I’m assuming you can’t share the methodology for linking these accounts to help combat this stuff but I’m very curious if that isn’t an issue.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

essentially start by identifying the accounts posting links to the domain in question, then analyze the voting behavior of the accounts upvoting these posts. you can start by sorting out accounts that have legitimate activity and then narrow it down further and find common patterns that only apply to these accounts.

most of them were also created in similar time frames.

edit:

to extend on this, once you have something to go on with it's fairly easy. the hard part is finding something that applies in a more generic way to identify this happening before someone else discovers unusual voting patterns and reports them.