@pixelfed There is no fediverse project that can detect...

@pixelfed There is no fediverse project that can detect follow bots or like bots, and doing so would require a lot of data and refactoring for it to be useful, even IG can't do this at scale

We can use innovative techniques and behavioural analysis to help detect this, but it remains a challenging problem

"Buy mastodon followers" will become an industry of shady services with sleeper accounts on various fediverse instances (they might already exist)

Like 20 Jul 2023 at 13:34 | Open on mastodon.social

2 comments

Darnell Clayton :verified:

@dansup @pixelfed This is actually a huge issue across all social networks. I remember @th3j35t3r detected fake accounts created on #CounterSocial (https://counter.social) from hostile nations & spam farms last year according to memory.

Counter Social suspended the hostile/spam bots (using an algorithm I think) & had all of the accounts manually reviewed to make sure legit accounts were not deleted.

It’s a long & tedious process.

20 Jul 2023 at 13:45 | Open on one.darnell.one

FlyingMana

@dansup @pixelfed follow and like bots are a lot easier to detect then it seems.
They have usually one of 2 purposes.

1. gather followers for selling it later

2. execute the Spam via Name, Description or pinned post.

The first group is not very much annoying for most, as many do not realize its spam.
The second is easy to detect, because the spam and especially the url is following an easy detectable pattern

20 Jul 2023 at 16:02 | Open on phpc.social

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