I'm getting a lot of "please use the Mastodon report function to tell us about the Russian disinformation accounts we are hosting".

I'm getting a lot of "please use the Mastodon report function to tell us about the Russian disinformation accounts we are hosting".

With all due respect, if you have three or more, I'm not sitting here and clicking through each and every account to create a report, you're going to get a DM or an email.

Today I've spent five hours identifying, tracking, verifying, documenting, and reporting accounts.

Five hours.

If you take five minutes to review new accounts, I don't need to do this.

@iftas
I try to keep on top of new accounts, but these accounts sit idle for a month, it seems, and suddenly start posting propaganda. It takes a while before I notice sometimes.

I sincerely appreciate what you do, and a DM or email is absolutely fine for me. Whatever takes the least effort and time for you.

@admin yep, looks like 5-10 days it's left blank to see if it's removed, then it gets bridged to Bluesky and left alone again, then it gets connected to the spam firehose. If 1 follow (the bridge) and follow/followers is hidden from public, that's a strong signal.

iftas@mastodon.iftas.org admin@hear-me.social we get that crap a lot too, but we have a post queue that catches the first post for any account. (NodeBB, not Mastodon)

It does unfortunately increase workload, and spammers are starting to use AI to craft innocuous messages to get past manual detection, but it might be the next needed step.

@julian @iftas @admin What a mess.

@julian @iftas
It's good idea!

@julian @admin do you use stopforumspam or anything similar?

@iftas @julian
I don't. I just took a bunch of email addresses of spam accounts that I recently suspended and none of them are hits.

I can't use IP addresses. I don't collect them. A promise I make to those who sign up.

Have you found these services helpful?

admin@hear-me.social iftas@mastodon.iftas.org personally for community.nodebb.org or ActivityPub.Space, no.

Traffic is low enough that the overhead of reviewing posts happens fairly rarely.

For a busier site I could see the potential appeal, but I'm not sure how good their data sets are.