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.
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.
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.
you have no proof for any of this.
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.
so maybe you shouldn't smear people baselessly
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.
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]:
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.
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.
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.
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.
If only someone would take some time and kindly put together an effective analogy for why the issue is not his beliefs.
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…
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.
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'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.
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.
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 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.
You're absolutely off your rocker, my friend. If you don't know the specifics, then stop acting like you do. I'm not going to go hunting through the lemmy.world modlog, you're the one who's making outlandish claims of harassment and spamming. You're just repeating the same things over and over in increasingly verbose fashion without providing any new information.
Find the evidence, screenshot it, and insert the screenshot into your reply. It's not rocket science. Or better yet, block the guy and move on with your life. Jfc you people are like actual IRL energy vampires.
I... what? I thought a link you could click, and a specific thing to Ctrl-F for to find the specific entry, would be "evidence", but if you want some evidence in image format, that's cool too.
Harassing in private messages:
Other assorted behavior:
That's only from the first two pages of the modlog, it keeps going. That's also not all of it, just some stuff that's pretty self-explanatory in the screenshot, and a good variety of different types of things he likes to do.
They dealt with him at length trying to do temp bans and just remove the content when he did this stuff, and talk to him and be reasonable with him, for far longer than I would have. Eventually they figured out they had to permaban him. That's when he started making new accounts and further hyped up his banner talking about how his enemies were trying to silence him but he remained unbroken.
Well first of all, thank you for doing that. I can see he was banned for harassing users in PMs, but without knowing the content of the PMs, that doesn't mean too much to me.
I'm looking for stuff like hate speech and serious toxicity, not just running afoul of various moderation rules. The spamming of comments is mildly annoying, but again nothing major in my eyes. Posting in the wrong communities, getting banned from lemmy.ml communities, this is pedestrian stuff when it comes to being a moderator.
I've seen people post absolutely horrific, disgusting things on here. They would get banned immediately, and then continue to create new accounts and post the same horrific shit. That's what banning on sight/IP banning is for, not for this middling stuff.
Most importantly, he seems to have learned from this and is no longer doing those things on his SJW account. Have you considered the possibility that his behavior escalated in such a way because he was repeatedly being moderated for minor reasons, and thus began to act out in increasingly disruptive ways? Perhaps he has been less problematic on his SJW account because we let him do his own thing so long as it's not bothering our users and generating tons of reports, which it isn't.
You are, of course, welcome to your opinion and to run your instance however you like. Moderators from both lemmy.ca and lemmy.world have stepped into these comments to tell you that he is a problem, and the new steady flow of abrasive political posts he's been doing recently in his own little corner of sh.itjust.works is likely to continue and escalate, to no one's benefit. That's my opinion.
If someone's reaction to being moderated, whether fairly or unfairly, is to "act out," and you feel like catering to them so they won't feel the need to do that, then you and he deserve one another. I just feel bad for your users who will have to deal with this guy's crap.
I'm not catering to anybody. Not to you guys, and certainly not to him. He's subject to the same rules as any other SJW user.
In my opinion, it would make more sense for you guys to be responding to the absurdity of the OP asking for a permaban across all Lemmy servers, rather than dedicating your efforts to chastising me for being skeptical of that plan. But instead, OP got 200 upvotes and a bunch of highly upvoted bloodthirsty comments in full agreement, and I'm the one who has to prove the validity of my entirely reasonable position one painstaking comment at a time. But you have at least acknowledged my points, which is more than I've come to expect, so I'll take it.
Why do you think such a large amount of people upvoted this? Based on the comments, a lot of people ran into him at some point, and the vast consensus is that he should be at least blocked, if not banned.
I saw you mentioning above that all of the commenters could be OP's alt, are you serious on this? All of these accounts are well known commenters, with years old accounts and plenty of comments.
Do you think Lemmy.ca and LW admins would be agree to ban a user without doing their due diligence? This is why OP is asking for a Lemmy wide ban, because this user is known for ban evasion: https://sh.itjust.works/post/31017252/16043527
Also btw I had to use my SJW account to comment here as the first commenter used a lemmynsfw account, that quite a lot of instances defederate. You might not get feedback from a high number of people on this specific thread due to this.
The lemmy.world moderation team was highly negligent in letting him go on as long as he did there. He was posting multiple posts of thousands of words of bizarre horror-story erotica where his enemies on Lemmy would get their comeuppance, and swearing innocently that he was just doing some creative writing, nothing about anybody in particular, and they were still saying "Yes, yes, we need this in our community, what a creative young man."
That was just the erotic friend fiction that all well-adjusted people write.
https://lemmy.world/modlog?page=1&userId=9454261
https://lemmy.world/modlog?page=1&userId=11014449
https://lemmy.world/modlog?page=1&userId=10787825
https://lemmy.world/modlog?page=1&userId=11971002
https://lemmy.world/modlog?page=1&userId=12269600
https://lemmy.world/modlog?page=1&userId=11173284
https://lemmy.world/modlog?page=1&userId=10969245
https://lemmy.world/modlog?page=1&userId=11967791
https://lemmy.world/modlog?page=1&userId=10975561
https://lemmy.world/modlog?page=1&userId=11359572
https://lemmy.world/modlog?page=1&userId=11969153
https://lemmy.world/modlog?page=1&userId=12053197
https://lemmy.world/modlog?page=1&userId=11363522
Lmao I had no idea there was that much. I stopped screenshotting after 2 pages of excerpts for one of his accounts.
In fairness, 1/2 to 2/3rds are "Ban Evasion" and an instant nuke.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
There's always an xkcd.
I thought imaqtpie asked a very relevant and fair question about what the big even deal is, if UniversalMonk posted a bunch of stories to one of his one-man communities. I thought I addressed it from that perspective: Yes, it sounds like OP is making a disproportionate freak-out about this, because you're right that it really isn't a big deal on the face of it. Here's where from my point of view that sudden and over-the-top reaction might come from. Then he said I was off my rocker.
Ok, I take that one back. Your rocker is structurally sound, that was uncalled for. I'm still not banning him though. At least not yet.
This goes in the "shit UM would say" bucket.
Good. I already told you I liked the cut of his jib. Plus he's got a rockin' bod 😂
I see someone's been watching Doublelift lately lol
Lol nah I actually took that line from a Lemmy comment I read the other day. You really think I'd watch another streamer besides the one and only pie? He's been streaming league again btw. He's super washed mechanically but he's still got that rizz and those devilish good looks 😂
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.
you have no proof for any of these claims.
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.
everyone knows how you "investigate" other users, so my guess is you already did look through my posts, and you saw most of what I do is demand evidence for specious claims.
I want you to fill in the blanks:
___ ____ __ _____ ___ ___ __ _____ ______.
if you have something to say, say it.