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.
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.”
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.