Today I noticed a huge wall of spam from UniversalMonk from 2 different accounts and didn’t initially think much of it and blocked their communities but more spam came from different communities.

At this point I checked and saw that they had created several communities which then led me down the rabbit hole to discover that their posts had almost entirely covered the new posts page of both sh.itjust.works and lemm.ee. Later on I discovered that they’re posting right-wing propaganda and misinformation from breitbart, foxnews you name it.

He’s already caused and stirred shit 2 months ago and clearly I can see why now.

At this point it’s difficult to believe that UniversalMonk will learn proper netiquette in: not post spamming, being considerate to others, and not sharing right-wing extremist content that no one wants.

  • x1gma@lemmy.worldEnglish
    201·
    3 hours ago

    Why are we giving this person their stage again? How probable is it that the instance admins of the like 15 instances they have accounts on will all collectively ban him? It’s just your average nazi spammer on the internet. You’ve read that “bio” this person has. Even if they get banned, they’ll come back just on principle. Just block him like any sane person would do, leave him shadow banned like that with his nazi friends, and call it a day.

  • geekwithsoul@lemm.eeEnglish
    14·
    3 hours ago

    Oh wow. UM really is just a malignancy that refuses to go away, isn’t he? I’m all for allowing different opinions but if someone keeps peeing in the pool, sooner or later you stop letting him in.

  • TORFdot0@lemmy.worldEnglish
    8·
    2 hours ago

    100% if he is breaking the ToS on multiple instances (and I would argue that spamming most likely is, not to mention the substance of the content)

    He can always create his own instance and anyone who wants to see his content can join it as well. Instance admins shouldn’t feel obligated to give anyone a platform (ahem, .world), the fediverse is decentralized and democratic.

  • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    16·
    4 hours ago

    Oh wow, that’s the first time I’ve seen this person’s userpage and read… whatever that is.

    So fucking cringe.

  • Shardikprime@lemmy.worldEnglish
    36·
    1 hour ago

    This is harassment directed towards one specific user.

    If you find direct offense to their posts, you should let the instance admins manage that through reports. If there is many instances, do that many reports.

    But this is basically fascist harassment. A witch hunt.

    What, no one can dissent from your ideology? Is it that weak that it cannot and will not handle criticism?

    The reverse applies as well. If you want, open your own instance echo chamber and talk to yourself.

  • Matt@lemmy.mlEnglish
    42·
    3 hours ago

    I’m in the center. But as long as it’s not illegal, then it’s OK.

  • Coelacanth@feddit.nuEnglish
    343·
    7 hours ago

    This fucker is still around eh? I remember him single-handedly sowing discord in c/politics around the time of the election with incessant pro 3rd party spam and insane tirades of sealioning - also report abuse if I remember right. Or at least taunting people into breaking rules and subsequently reporting them. I was amazed at the time that he was allowed to remain unbanned for ages in that sub when it was very clear what he was doing.

    • sunzu2@thebrainbin.org
      510·
      3 hours ago

      What’s wrong with advocating for 3p vote?

      Did the party komissars prohibit these discussions in DNC controlled subs?

  • empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    1412·
    12 hours ago

    That mf is still around? And now they’re spamming right wing nazi stuff, despite definitely for sure being a legitimate honest 3rd party Jill Stein Stan? My gosh, say it isn’t so!

    There is nothing for them to learn about “netiquette”, they are a cancerous wart intentionally participating in bad faith with the entire fediverse.

  • archonet@lemy.lolEnglish
    262·
    10 hours ago

    oh, that tard’s still around? I blocked him months ago.

    I can affirm my experience has been all the better for it, so yes, the rest of the fediverse should throw the Nazi out of the bar.

  • schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    7016·
    12 hours ago

    Here’s the thing: without this thread, I might never have become aware of this user or their activities. Are you sure that what you’re doing isn’t counterproductive and giving them more undeserved attention?

    • recursive_recursion they/them@lemmy.caOPEnglish
      233·
      11 hours ago

      I can see what you mean by that although for this case in an odd manner you actually want to highlight this problem.

      This is another parallel system that was shown in this crazy GDC talk: 1,500 Slot Machines Walk into a Bar: Adventures in Quantity Over Quality

      For background context Alex Schwartz and Ziba Scott launched premium mobile games to the Google Play Store in 2013 which unfortunately didn’t “help in making our money back and being able to make enough money to make the next game”. After having explored the storefront and finding nefarious apps and junk reskined clones everywhere they decided to intentionally flood the Google Play Store with junk slot machine games as a joke/experiment.

      "There was a point in here that I don’t think was drilled home as hard as it could have been which was… if people are sneaking by with garbage the thing that we did was to put a huge neon sign with an arrow pointing at ourselves and the garbage next to us; illuminating the entire underbelly of dark weird App Store shit and so the idea that if you do it at scale clearly they’re(Google’s) going to notice and clearly they’re(Google’s) going to change the terms of service slowly to ice you out.

      Hopefully others went down with us in the wake of that. Like we provided the perfect targeted spot to drop the missile uh so hopefully, hopefully that helped get rid of duplicate apps that were also in the area."

      • ThePowerOfGeek@lemmy.worldEnglish
        15·
        11 hours ago

        I agree with you. In this case it’s time to bring this up. I quietly blocked monk months ago because I was tired of seeing his shit in my feed, but I didn’t want to bring attention to his inflammatory posts. But that clearly hasn’t worked on a wider level. He’s still posting sketchy stuff and annoying other people here. Sometimes you have to call people out and the wider community has to act, even at the risk of drawing attention to the problem users.

    • realcaseyrollinsEnglish
      515·
      12 hours ago

      I’ve come across him before, I think he moderates a right wing Lemmy community I’m a member of.

  • ReallyActuallyFrankenstein@lemmynsfw.comEnglish
    671·
    13 hours ago

    They are at best a one-person propaganda shop, and at worst part of a targeted influence campaign by other actors.

    I’ve written many times on this user in the lead-up to the US election, when there was cumulative evidence they were spamming content meant to split the left vote. I welcome moderate or right-leaning good faith discussion, but this user is not that. They sealion any responses with canned / apparently-LLM-assisted non-answers to legitimate constructive comments and debate, apparently to drive up “engagement” on their posts. I’ve read probably 30 threads where this happened - they do not answer direct questions or engage in actual debate, but immediately go into “I’m a victim” mode and turn the debate into a performative martyred “oppression” by everyone else. Effectively every response by them I’ve read is a misdirection and nonsense.

    My strongly held opinion is that they are a bad faith actor, no matter what their motive or tools actually are. They are literally the only Lemmy user I’ve come across that I can say, without reservation, deserves a perma-ban.

    • remotelove@lemmy.caEnglish
      13·
      8 hours ago

      Yeah, it’s a common pattern with the “victim” crap. Same stuff I was just testing, actually. (Check my comment history with UM over the last day or so; re: define propaganda)

      Very nonsensical responses, no discussion and just absolute crap posts. If it is LLM assisted, it’s tuned to respond to people like they are hating on the acual article and UM. It’s an easy formula: post a shit article and just argue with everyone about anything while assuming they are commenting against the post.

      But I have met people just like that IRL and it usually comes with some serious mental disorders or poorly prescribed medications. (I am being extremely serious with that comment and no joke is intended, at all.) It’s probably for that person’s benefit to get kick-banned at all turns. Assuming it’s actually one real person, social media is not where they need to be spending their time.

    • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catEnglish
      28·
      12 hours ago

      I think UniversalMonk is a real person with significant mental issues. Most of the influence campaign accounts have a consistent MO, and part of the game is low effort. They want to maximize the impact with as little investment of typing and thinking as possible, because they have however-many other accounts to run and they have a quota of comments they need to write. They just have a very particular way of interacting on Lemmy that doesn’t change all that much from one account to another as far as I can tell. He tries way too hard to be a normal-pattern influence operation. I think his accounts take way more work than it would be worth it to spend if he were paid by the hour. It would also be better just to have 10 accounts and have his spam of posted stories get spread out among all 10 of them instead of all comes from one.

      Whether UM is a right-winger who is deliberately trying in his own insanity-tinged way to sow discord and hurt the left, or he’s sincerely pursuing some cartwheeling internal compass that I’m not privy to the details of, I don’t know. But I think he’s a real human who is representing himself more or less authentically. Not truthfully. But all this fanatical stuff he types up is in my opinion pretty authentic to who he is as a person, if that makes sense.

        • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catEnglish
          92·
          5 hours ago

          Absolutely correct. You also don’t have proof that I’m not a dog. You can still be reasonably confident that I’m a human, and talk accordingly, based on your best belief and understanding.

            • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catEnglish
              91·
              5 hours ago

              UniversalMonk you mean? Hm… maybe not. Mostly I just talk about his actions, and how they negatively impact everyone else on the network, and how it’s appropriate to react to his behaviors. I do think about his motivations, and my read on him and why he’s doing these things, but maybe it is out of line for me to be talking about his mental state when the truth is that I have no idea.

              I wasn’t intending to be putting him down, actually. More saying that in that aspect he is being real. I have some sympathy for him, and at least partly, I was trying to express that there. But you’re right, speculating about something like that when I really have not the slightest idea about it is maybe not an appropriate thing for me to do.

      • imaqtpie@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        818·
        9 hours ago

        I didn’t analyze his posting habits all that closely because I’m not obsessed with stalking and persecuting everyone who thinks differently from me, but it’s always been apparent to me that he’s a real person with ahem an unconventional belief system, to say the least. He seems to come from an era before the internet, when people didn’t care as much what other people thought of them. Some people don’t neatly fall into the buckets of left wing and right wing, as currently defined by the mainstream media. That’s a good thing, imho.

        As far as I can tell, he mostly just posts to communities that he created, and if OP wants to hunt around and subscribe to those communities and read the posts, that’s their problem. He actually seems like a pretty nice guy imo, reminds me of my uncle who believes all sorts of wild conspiracy theories but is ultimately a stand-up guy in his daily life.

        To address the alleged ban-worthy offenses directly @[email protected]:

        post spamming

        He can spam as many posts as he wants to the communities that he created, although 2-3 posts per day doesn’t even remotely qualify as spamming. If you choose to subscribe to them and refuse to block him, you have only yourself to blame.

        [not] being considerate to others

        Is it considerate to hunt through another users profile for reasons to permaban them from all of Lemmy? Is it considerate to LARP as a mod in service of a personal grudge? I think you could actually learn a few things about being considerate from Mr. Monk, he seems quite polite in most interactions.

        not sharing right-wing extremist content

        Fox News and Breitbart are not extremist content, they are mainstream news outlets regularly consumed by a frighteningly large proportion of the American population. It is what it is, I’m not happy about it either but you can’t simply label everything you don’t agree with as extremist content.

        I will not be banning users simply because some of their beliefs could be described as right-wing. If those beliefs lead them to treat other users in a hateful or toxic manner, that’s another story, but I see no evidence of that.

        On the other hand, banning users for stirring drama and harassing other users is always an option. I don’t like to ban anyone, but I would argue this kind of behavior is far more problematic than Monk’s behavior.

        • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catEnglish
          182·
          10 hours ago

          As far as I can tell, he mostly just posts to communities that he created

          After spamming many others and getting banned, and then sending harassing DMs once he was no longer able to post most places he hadn’t created. And then creating new accounts on new instances so he could get around bans he had received on the old accounts.

          I will not be banning users simply because some of their beliefs could be described as right-wing

          If only someone would take some time and kindly put together an effective analogy for why the issue is not his beliefs.

          Is it considerate to hunt through another users profile for reasons to permaban them from all of Lemmy?

          If anybody had to hunt to find him, he wouldn’t be an issue. There are plenty of accounts quietly posting their own brand of weirdness to their own weird communities, and it is always fine.

          OP actually specifically brought up that the impetus for this post was seeing a whole new fresh batch of UM spam in some definitely not private community.

          Your whole comment reads like an example from a narcissistic personality disorder handbook, about how to create a whole alternate reality that makes whatever-it-is justified, and then act so reasonable, and so confused, about how anyone in the alternate reality you described could ever think something negative about whichever person it is, when all they did was…

          • imaqtpie@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            58·
            9 hours ago

            After spamming many others and getting banned, and then sending harassing DMs once he was no longer able to post most places he hadn’t created.

            People keep seeing this but I haven’t actually seen any evidence. Kindly provide the screenshots. Having accounts on different servers is a complete non-issue, most people have multiple accounts on Lemmy.

            If only someone would take some time and kindly put together an effective analogy for why the issue is not his beliefs.

            What do you mean? Just come right out and say what you believe the issue is, I honestly don’t know what you’re alluding to.

            If anybody had to hunt to find him, he wouldn’t be an issue. There are plenty of accounts quietly posting their own brand of weirdness to their own weird communities, and it is always fine.

            I’m literally the admin of his server and I haven’t seen his name in over a month. I haven’t seen him get reported and I haven’t seen any of his posts because I’m not subscribed to his communities. He is exactly what you just described, an account posting his own brand of weirdness to his own communities.

            OP actually specifically brought up that the impetus for this post was seeing a whole new fresh batch of UM spam in some definitely not private community.

            Where? 90% of the posts in the screenshots were made to communities he created, that have almost no subscribers and very few upvotes and downvotes. Please link the fresh batch of spam, because I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about. I just scrolled through his 40 most recent posts, and 38 of them were on his own communities, one was on c/conservative and the other was on c/twosentencehorror, with 11 upvotes.

            • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catEnglish
              12·
              9 hours ago

              People keep seeing this but I haven’t actually seen any evidence. Kindly provide the screenshots. Having accounts on different servers is a complete non-issue, most people have multiple accounts on Lemmy.

              Multiple accounts is fine obviously. Multiple accounts to get around a ban and continue the behavior that led to the ban, doubling down on how right you were in the first place, seems like something that it would be better not to allow.

              https://lemmy.world/modlog?page=1&userId=9454261 and search for “harassing users in pms”. I don’t know the specifics beyond that. If you read the modlog, down below the massive list of spam posts that were removed, you can see some of the types of comments that presumably, when he was making them in DMs, got him sitebanned.

              What do you mean? Just come right out and say what you believe the issue is, I honestly don’t know what you’re alluding to.

              I commented here, explaining for the sake of people who keep insisting that he got banned because of what his beliefs are:

              https://ponder.cat/post/1293130/1478863

              If you don’t know his history on lemmy.world, the analogy might not seem all that hard-hitting I guess. It was never a problem that he was, among other things, claiming to be a socialist who supported third parties. It was a problem that he was posting basically the same 3 or 4 types of articles about it, 10-20 times a day to the same communities, and aggressively attacking anyone who disagreed with him about it.

              If he’s had a change of heart, and realized that he was being obnoxious and now wants to be a good citizen, it would be fine. Maybe. Instead, what he’s done is pivoted to posting MAGA stuff, instead of socialism stuff. He’s now posting breitbart and the NY Post, on things like “Here’s why wokeism will be the downfall of America” and “Trump can use Russia’s space program to end the war in Ukraine.”

              He loves drama. He posted third-party stuff before the election, and is now posting diametrically opposed stuff to /c/conservative. Is it deliberately to piss people off? That seems more likely than that, right as the election happened, he suddenly shifted all his focus and discovered that wokeism is the main problem, instead of the genocide in Gaza being the main problem. That’s what people mean in calling him a troll.

              I’m literally the admin of his server and I haven’t seen his name in over a month. I haven’t seen him get reported and I haven’t seen any of his posts because I’m not subscribed to his communities. He is exactly what you just described, an account posting his own brand of weirdness to his own communities.

              Where? 90% of the posts in the screenshots were made to communities he created, that have almost no subscribers and very few upvotes and downvotes. Please link the fresh batch of spam, because I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about. I just scrolled through his 40 most recent posts, and 38 of them were on his own communities, one was on c/conservative and the other was on c/twosentencehorror, with 11 upvotes.

              I just looked for myself. I get your point. He’s got a right to “spam” in his own communities, or post sources I don’t think are credible, even after being banned from doing so in the main news communities on some other instance.

              The issue I think OP is trying to bring to your attention, which I think is why he had what might seem like a disproportionate freak-out in response to seeing 9 suspect posts all in a row all from UniversalMonk on the “Local New” feed, is that this guy has a proven commitment to obnoxiousness that is probably only temporarily in abeyance.

              You can do what you want, obviously. If he’s actually changed, then great. I would look at his behavior in the present as an indication of what he will probably continue to do. I think his main goal is probably going to be to spread disinformation on your server and ramp up to being obnoxious up to the limit of what won’t get him banned, and what might look like an overreaction based on that little series of posts is based largely on how much drama and antagonism he managed to cause on lemmy.world before they kicked him out.

        • WrenFeathers@lemmy.worldEnglish
          172·
          9 hours ago

          They were directly PM’ing people and being aggressively antagonistic. This is what ultimately got them banned. Then they ban evaded, and created communities to troll.

          I suppose it should go without saying but I’ll say it anyway- they stirred up drama during the election and specifically targeted democratic voting, claiming to be in support of third parties-

          Only to come out of the other end as a conservative propagandist. This is the definition of bad-faith trolling and is absolutely grounds for being banned.

          If you run an instance, you’re free to protect them all you wish. But elsewhere, they should be banned.

          • imaqtpie@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            48·
            10 hours ago

            I dunno what they’ve done on other accounts, I don’t have any control over that. They haven’t done anything banworthy on SJW that I can see. I haven’t even received any reports that I can recall.

            Only to come out of the other end as a conservative propagandist.

            What is your evidence for this? Everything I see on their profile states that they voted third party in the election. Criticizing the democratic candidates does not imply they are a conservative propagandist. Ffs we have thousands of tankies on Lemmy who did the same shit. Are they right-wingers as well?

            • WrenFeathers@lemmy.worldEnglish
              163·
              9 hours ago

              I dunno what they’ve done on other accounts,

              I do know. That’s is why I can say this. I’m a moderator for a popular community on .world and remember very well the trouble they caused a few months back.

              There is tons of evidence throughout the comments on this post of others who have had to deal with them. You can either think that this many people, across multiple instances are randomly conspiring against an innocent person chosen at random, or you can think that maybe you don’t have enough information to suggest we exonerate the troll…

              As I said, if you run your own instance, you’re clearly free to do as you wish, but having had to deal with them- and the drama they caused, I stand firmly with anyone choosing to remove them from theirs.

              • imaqtpie@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
                514·
                9 hours ago

                If the trouble was so bad that you believe they deserve to be banned on sight, post the damn evidence.

                As far as I know, half the accounts commenting on this post could be and probably are OP’s alts. What the fuck do you think this is, mob justice? You’re not standing firmly with anyone, you’re actively harassing this guy because of some personal grudge from months ago. Let it go.

                Or alternatively, show me what he did that was so unforgivable.

                • WrenFeathers@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  13·
                  8 hours ago

                  This isn’t a court of law. I don’t need to prove to you the reasons this person should be banned. Besides…. others have already posted the damn evidence.

                  I told you they harassed other users. I am not going to share private messages with you. Their comment history is public as is their modlog. I suggest you look into it yourself.

                  AGAIN- if you disagree, and you have the authority to do so, then allow them access to your instance. I don’t really care.

                  I am simply illustrating reasons why the should be banned- along with all the other people here.

      • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catEnglish
        102·
        5 hours ago

        It’s very tempting to go back through your comment history, and drop a reply under every single comment that makes any kind of factual argument: “you have no proof for any of these claims”, but life is short, so I won’t. You can just imagine that I did, and post me a reply with the proof for all of it all together, if you like.