AlexTECPlayz1d ago

There's a new spam wave of AI-generated slop for SEO purposes, lot of new accounts from various instances. All posts use the following tags:

#BrowserAutomation #AI #TechDeep #WebDev #Playwright

#fediblock #fediadmin

I kinda wish Fedi had moderation bots we could use to mass-block or mass-ban this stuff based on patterns or something.

Show threadclonedhuman1d ago

@alextecplayz Gotta do a fresh wave of account blocking today I guess.

Seeing a ton of no-pfp new accounts using this tag.

Show threadAlexTECPlayz1d ago

@clonedhuman yeah, the usernames have the following patterns:

webautomation_marc_(random characters)
seo_automation_(random characters)
browserauto_marc_(random)
marc_webtech_(random)
marcthompson_seo_(random)
marc_(webtech / automate / other subject)_(random)

Show threadclonedhuman1d ago
@alextecplayz Yeah, and it looks like they're all from the same handful of instances, making it unlikely that reporting them will do much good.
Show threadclonedhuman
@alextecplayz Might be worthwhile to block the Mastodon instances where this is occurring. I'm not sure if there's anything else on them.
Mar 26 at 12:02pmWeb
Show threadAlexTECPlayz1d ago

@clonedhuman some of them are popular. piaille.fr has 7.8K users, glasgow.social, mastoturk.org, drumstodon.net, if I remember right there were a few even from mastodon.social (but I could be wrong)

I wouldn't directly block the instances, but it would be nice if we could automate blocking specific accounts (e.g. through that FIRES thing), or submit an advisory/recommendation to recommend blocking a specific list of accounts.

Show threadclonedhuman1d ago
@alextecplayz Yeah, I agree that we could use a more robust/detailed blocking mechanism. I'm going to report a few more of these accounts to the larger instances and hope they can do something to prevent this sort of hashtag spam from occurring.