Are you running an open registration mastodon instance?
Have you dealt with local accounts being reported for Russian troll farm or misinformation activity?
You NEED to look at more than just those accounts.
For each one that is getting reported, there are probably a dozen that do not. Once the troll farms get one in and that lasts a while, they'll come back and make more. Lots more.
🧵 1/5
This kind of activity is not new. See also https://about.iftas.org/2025/10/05/coordinated-pro-russian-propaganda-network-targeting-activitypub-and-atproto-services/
If you are absolutely certain that you cannot close registration or at least require account approval, you will need to be very vigilant and have someone watching your account creations or local timeline constantly.
CURRENT Russian misinformation troll farm accounts will usually fit at least 4, but never all, of the below:
🧵 2/5
- Usernames that look like random strings that are kinda pronounceable, 5 to 8 characters long.
- Cutesy ai-generated cartoon you'd expect from a random profile picture generator
- AI-generated portrait photo that does not seem to match the firstname_lastname account name.
- Bio that looks real at a glance, but if you read it, it actually makes no sense. Occasionally their posts are like this too.
- Extremely prolific posting on exactly one political topic
🧵 3/5
- Posts split up by "..." which results in some posts starting and ending with "..." and happens no matter what the instance's char limit is.
- Almost all posts have images, and the images are reused a lot (including across multiple accounts)
- Sentences sometimes miss spaces between them (a fun thing AI bots do, so y'know)
- Posts repeatedly end with usernames on other platforms, or media site links (texts get split across multiple posts, so not all will end in these)
🧵 4/5
- Commonly used tags are parties, locations, and regions related to european or middle-east conflicts etc.
- May be mimicking pro-israel rhetoric, posting islamophobia, or pro-iran rhetoric, posting antisemitism, to cause anger and stir engagement from hashtags
- May be mimicking Ukrainian Azov members to make Ukraine seem dominated by nazism
Running a fedi server is not just the monetary cost of hosting the server.
Someone must spend time, DAILY, on bullshit like this as well.
🧵 5/5
report, report, report the #vatniks #vatnik accounts
their game is always straight boring mediocre #DARVO
(deny, attack, reverse victim and offender: the west is to blame for #russia invading #ukraine, somehow, amazingly)
ukraine is always #nazi, somehow, amazingly, while #putin engages in #genocide #ethnofascism #imperialism mass murder: the real #nazism
we do not need #kremlin #disinfo on the #fediverse, but it keeps cropping up. it requires your reporting
@el_on_libera what's a "Russian troll farm" account? As a leftist in the US I've heard a lot about Russian agents/trolls/etc being responsible for, lol, pretty much all that is wrong here, such as racism, fascism, climate change, etc etc, but I've never seen a "troll farm" myself. Is that, like, a group of political writers who write things you don't like?
Is a troll farm something like the US CyberCommand? Or more like Palantir?
@jbrownesq Why would you have seen one in the US?
You may have heard of "gold farms" though? Where mostly gig economy workers, make accounts on paid games and level up the character and/or grind currency. They then give the account to their employer who sells the stuff. Steve Bannon (yes that guy https://jacobin.com/2025/08/bannon-online-media-wow-coordination) used to run one.
It's really the same thing, but they're just spamming propaganda.
User farms aren't unique to Russia or politics. Russia just likes them a lot.
@el_on_libera so you are saying online game gold farms are the same as Russian troll farms? Or that's what the OP is talking about??
Why would I have seen one in the US? Not sure what that means. I was sarcastically referring to the IMMENSE amount of private and public hacking that exists here, in the US, hoping that others see this absurdity as well.
@el_on_libera yeah, I've been in tech a looong time and I've watched the media invent pop culture versions of all of the above, and then non tech folks pick up the cue and talk about "hackers and troll farms"(usually russian, Chinese of course)being behind all manner of things.
'Troll farms' are basically behind everything america doesn't like about itself, if im not mistaken. As a tech worker, I think about this often.
@jbrownesq I've been in tech and done tech space moderation for 2 decades.
It's not a media invention.
That gold farm CEO took over Breitbart News in 2012. He was a Trump v1 campaign advisor. That site targeted disaffected young men with prolifically linked articles that promoted bigoted talking points formulated to exploit insecurity about women, queer folk, and any demographic that fails to conform to what mainstream media tells young guys to want.
You may recall this as "Gamergate". 2014.
That "el" person on IRC
ᴮᵉⁿ ᴿᵒʸᶜᵉVOTE IN THE PRIMARIES
Greg
Jbrown, Esq
Marcos Dione