Exclusive: Justice Department indicts former FBI Director James Comey for a second time

Are we sure he wasnt just trying to use one of those complicated bathrooms?

rats. I was hoping for some irony.

You're right, though, it is directed and not inconsequential. I'll be checking to see if I get botted for asking, though. you know. to see if they're checking the content or not.

It was like 2 weeks and it really cemented her loss. I wonder if he still thinks it was a good idea.

I banned all those users for being vote manipulating bots.

Thank you, and thanks for pointing it out. I really appreciate your rapid action, and I know I'm not alone in this.

I just wish the admins had done the same with the whereIsTamara alts, as those are still active.

EDITED to self-correct: This is my error. The whereIsTamara alts are indeed banned on lemmy.world; it's lemmy.org that has taken no action. My sincere apologies.

They are not banned on Lemmy.world. Just on the news community. I have notified the admins, so they should receive the ban hammer soon.

You did what you could, which is all I expect. There are multiple layers of mgmt involved and I forgot to specify; my error. I hope you saw my correction above, and thank you again. I really appreciate it.

Totally forgot he and Robert Mueller are different people, I was sure Comey was dead, oops

Edit: I dunno why but this post is getting botted by a bunch of new accounts from Lemmy.org

The only times I've noticed lemmy.org were because of bad, bot-like behavior. Is that instance just a bot farm?

Agreed. But if someone is going to suffer for it, the guy who had a major hand in making it a reality should be one of them.

Let's see the discovery!

they don't seem to be moderating at all, nor interacting with anything on the fediverse other than spamming to their own communities, likely automated. we will defed from them soon if i don't receive a response to my pm. i'm aware of at least one other instance admin unsuccessfully attempting to reach out to them already due to lack of moderation.

Done, though they haven't been active since February.

Well this sucks to hear. Can’t say I’m surprised that a shitty instance carries an innocuous name, following L Ron’s playbook. I’ve checked comments as far back as a few days ago getting peppered with bot downvotes so maybe I rustled someone’s jimmies, idk

They were all down voting today. All the accounts were created today

The way I see it, that means you must be doing something right: it's generally not goodhearted folks with principles messing with other people's votes.

Any way to report the bot accounts or does it even matter?

Yes, IMO you can and you should, though it's been taken care of here. In this case, the comments were reported and the community mod, JonsJava, stepped up and banned them from the comm, and said they'd notify lemmy.world admins for instance-wide banning.

The first step is putting in a report on the affected comments; I usually use "vote manipulation, see thread" or something like that so the mod who responds can see the discussion. That's also why I add screenshots in my related comments: while that's not necessary, it presents the proof upfront and no one has to go looking for it. A community mod can then address it in the community itself, and they usually do.

The second step is letting the admins of both the originating instance and the community instance know what's going on. Here, one of the affected persons posted a follow up saying they'd contacted the admin of the instance where the vote manipulation is coming from, lemmy.org, and the community mod added in his own follow up that he was notifying the admins of lemmy.world directly. Had I not seen that I would have emailed the admins of lemmy.world myself.

If you see it, I say point it out, no matter what. To me, and take it for what it's worth, even if it doesn't matter in terms of responsive mods or admins or actions taken, we guarantee that nothing will happen if we don't report it. Maintaining a good community means that we all police ourselves to some extent; in this case it was in the form of comments and reports and contacting admins directly.

But no matter what, whether those reports get acted on or not, know that it absolutely matters to the people who put in a good-faith comment in the expectation that they were engaging with other human commenters on a relatively level playing field: it means something that someone else has their back when others are fucking around with their comment engagement.

Yeah, the whereIsTamara alts got banned on lemmy.world in February; the accounts that botted this thread were created today.

I should have been more clear when I brought it up, my apologies.

Thank you for this.