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Weird type of spam I discovered (vids2025) (feddit.nl)

submitted 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

4 comments fedilink hide all child comments

(I'm aware that I'm giving this spam more attention by posting this, but I really wanted to share this weird behaviour.)

There are accounts whose sole purpose seems to be posting links to a certain blogspot blog. The posts of this blog only consist of YouTube videos, with very basic titles such as "Kangaroo Fight", "Growing Strawberries", etc.

Here are some example accounts I found via a web search (unfortunately the URLs of posts isn't taken into account when searching on lemmy):

I also found two other accounts that seem to be part of this, too, but they were already banned:

Another interesting discovery: Compare the two links for each of the accounts marked with (*). You will notice that the posts on moist.catsweat.com link to YouTube, but when viewing the posts from lemmy.world those same posts link to the blogspot. Why is that?

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

It's been a long-running thing for blogspam to appear here. Usually admins will step in at some point and squash the accounts, but any time I see anything.blogspot.com as a post URL, I look at the account history and see if that's all they're posting. 9.9 times out of 10, that's all they're posting, and I ban them with content removal. Same for other sites that pop up out of nowhere that get spread from a brand new account.

I have no idea what the objective is (SEO, ad views, etc), but it's been a thing as long as I've been on Lemmy.

Thanks for the list: some of those I had yet to ban.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 days ago (1 children)

i noticed the spam accounts but appreciated the content, which is also usually in appropriate communities... so i assisted them by updating the links directly to the intended video.

i would generally not approve of these kinds of edits if they werent bots spamvertizing a blog site

link edits fail to propagate from mbin to lemmy... not sure why. thats why the different urls

e. looks like a bug that might be fixed in the next mbin release 1.8.1

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago

Thanks for clarifying!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago

Another interesting discovery: Compare the two links for each of the accounts marked with (*). You will notice that the posts on moist.catsweat.com link to YouTube, but when viewing the posts from lemmy.world those same posts link to the blogspot. Why is that?

Yeah, I think this is the real problem. It's Youtube on the home instance, it's not marked as edited (and even if it was, url changes are federated to Lemmy), and it federates as Youtube only (checked the AP response).
Where is Lemmy getting the blogspot from in the first place?