It's a Saturday in November, and a network of suspiciously similar Bluesky accounts with the display name "Olivia" is busily plagiarizing content and following popular accounts.
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Just in case this leads to wholesale blocking of Olivias @olivia.science is legit, I have met her in the flesh, she has probably been here longer than I have, she is a legit scientist.
I I went through “Olivia”&[0-9] and saw what seem to be multiple account clusters. The rest weren’t as cut’n’paste as Olivia-repeat-#’s, afaict, and could be nothing, but there were enough similarities within each category to pique my curiosity.
The clusters were “Olivia” & —
- repeat-#, set1= the set you ID’d;
- non-repeat-#, set2 = Portuguese accts;
- non-repeat-#, set3 = anime art accts;
- non-repeat-# set4 = unused accts with <5 followers and no content.
There was more variability than for set1; it may be noise not signal. Just FYI.
1. Recently Pete Buttigieg spoke about our need to become "harder targets" to foreign influence. He pointed out that, for foreign enemies, the primary goal is not a Trump win, it is 2 undermine our trust in each other + our instit's
These "Olivia" account confirm the truth of Buttigieg’s comments
2, The posts that all ten Olivia accounts posted are gen'ly harmless (they seem designed to gain trust). But the posts that 2 or 3 or 6 of the Olivia accounts posted, are each directed in different ways to undermining Trust
the 1st one criticizes UN org
2nd, right wing media
3rd, twitter as being tool of right wing propaganda
4th, the press - "The problem was and still is the MSM."
5th, suggests Trump won because his supporters are racist (not for any legitimate criticism they may have of Dem Party)
4. As Buttigieg said, we have to understand the insidiousness of this kind of propaganda. It plays on our emotions.
When we vent anger at MSM, when we say all Trump supporters are racist (and stop seeing them as humans), when we criticize the efficacy of the UN and other institutions,
5. we are eroding trust in American institutions, American press, other Americans. And by doing this, we help America's foreign enemies
In many ways, we - not Russian bots, not Tenet Media, not RT - are the best spreaders of RUS info campaigns. I am guilty as well. We have to learn to do better.
This network consists of 10 Bluesky accounts created on November 17th or 18th, each with the display name "Olivia" and a handle consisting of "olivia" followed by repeated digits. Each account has posted around a dozen times and follows roughly 600 accounts.
The network's content is repetitive, with most posts duplicated verbatim by multiple accounts in the network. (Four posts have been posted by all 10 accounts.) The text of the repetitive posts is plagiarized from various popular accounts.
Unsurprisingly, the accounts in this spam network use plagiarized profile photos. Yandex was more effective than Google or TinEye at tracking down previous uses of these photographs.
Yandex has always had really good image search. Not sure exactly why, but its been better than any of the competitors from my experience. OCR is good too.
In what may be an attempt to build a following, the accounts in this network have been following a variety of Bluesky users. The most frequently followed accounts are mostly journalists and political accounts, who by and large have not followed the spam accounts back.
You're amazing. You have always been amazing everywhere. Glad to see you here too now. I deactivated from that horrible place. Thank you for doing what you do.
I was such a fan of your twitter account, so it's great to see you here doing God's work all over again!
Instead of a list, would you create creating moderation lists of these networks as you uncover them? That way your followers could mute or block them all at once?
It's not just Olivias, either. I see all kinds of names, on accounts that all look more or less alike, and I never know how to categorize them beyond "stay away from that mess, it's up to something."
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https://bsky.app/moderation/modlists
And thank you for the work you do, it is very appreciated
- repeat-#, set1= the set you ID’d;
- non-repeat-#, set2 = Portuguese accts;
- non-repeat-#, set3 = anime art accts;
- non-repeat-# set4 = unused accts with <5 followers and no content.
There was more variability than for set1; it may be noise not signal. Just FYI.
Olivia-bots shuffling in
Plagiarising popular accounts
Need a blocklist to put them in
“I’m not really sure where to go”
“But I’m hot and I’m sweet and if you follow me, pussy pics bio”
These "Olivia" account confirm the truth of Buttigieg’s comments
the 1st one criticizes UN org
2nd, right wing media
3rd, twitter as being tool of right wing propaganda
4th, the press - "The problem was and still is the MSM."
5th, suggests Trump won because his supporters are racist (not for any legitimate criticism they may have of Dem Party)
When we vent anger at MSM, when we say all Trump supporters are racist (and stop seeing them as humans), when we criticize the efficacy of the UN and other institutions,
In many ways, we - not Russian bots, not Tenet Media, not RT - are the best spreaders of RUS info campaigns. I am guilty as well. We have to learn to do better.
Guess Bsky's star is on the rise if the bots and AI scrapers and such are coming here...
Rather than one by one as there’s loads of them.
She has some nice clothes though 😉
Instead of a list, would you create creating moderation lists of these networks as you uncover them? That way your followers could mute or block them all at once?
SONT DE VRAIES UTILISATEURS "MOUTONS "
50 % DES VRAIES "RÉVEILLÉS "
ET 25 % DE COMPTES DE L'IA