As some of you may be aware, over the past few weeks there have been an increasing number of what I suspect are bots which will share one or even a few posts, all relevant to the communities they are shared in, at which point the account self-deletes. I’m torn as the stories are relevant, but they give me the impression of a narrative attack. I’ve seen only one of these accounts actually comment before deletion, otherwise they post and immediately nuke the account.
I have tagged mods and admins but have not heard any recognition on the problem. It’s also notable that by my impression this issue is getting worse. I noticed yesterday that communities I subscribe to which previously have not had this problem are now starting to receive these kinds of posts.
I want the fediverse to be a place to communicate with real people in good faith; this manner of posting runs contrary to that. So that begs the questions, is this actually a problem, and if so, what can be done about it?
Honestly, I think some sort of blind verification system is what the internet needs. Some kind of notary-like system where a verification happens locally with a person, and then no info on the person gets passed out except the verification to start an account.
maybe if there was somekind of trust based verification, kind of like how certifications work. You are issued a “certification” that you are decent enough and you can issue further ones and if you mess up too badly, yours might get revoked. It would probably be a terrible hassle though. Maybe it might work as supplementary verification system though.
Yeah. Kind of crazy I can lose access to a 20 year old acct and Google is just like ‘meh can’t verify you’ and we all just think that makes sense. I should be able to somehow verify who I am and get reinstated.
I wonder… you know how webpages use widgets to try to see if you’re human? Apparently they collect various data about how you interact with the webpage to figure out whether you’re human. Perhaps they could use that data to make a fingerprint that can tell people apart. It maybe would be fairly inaccurate, but combining it with other information like IP address or location information could work together to make a better digital fingerprint.
That is a real thing, it’s called tracking, it’s NOT “fairly inaccurate”, and we should all be fighting it. Highly advanced and multifaceted digital fingerprinting, including behavioural fingerprinting, is being used by corporations to spy on our internet activity.