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.
I agree with the sentiment but this here is not a complaints forum.
Please report that user and his communities to the admins of the instances he’s registered at. A quick look at the sidebars of both sh.itjust.works and lemm.ee would suggest that their admins banning him is a slam dunk.
Maybe ask at [email protected] and [email protected] what to do?
On the grounds of !fediverse not being a complaints forum, I’m going to lock this post.
Posting lying terrorist dens like breitbart or fox as news is ban-worthy on its own.
Jesus. Just openly demanding an echo chamber.
Forgot about that guy. They have the honor of being my first ever block.
How long have you been here? a day without a block is a day I probably wasn’t online for long.
I’ve got an empty block list. The most I do is add a tag if I’m browsing on my phone.
I’ve never blocked anyone.
Yeah me neither.
while there’s plenty of people on my list too I’d say the majority are just foreign language communities.
Blocking shit you don’t want to interact with is significantly easier than finding stuff you do, and makes the internet a much nicer place.
I like the internet to be a chaotic place.
it can be chaotic without being upsetting
I don’t get upset easily.
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 engagement, 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. Everything is a misdirection and nonsense.
They are a bad faith actor no matter what their motive or tools 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.
Well said, 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]:
post spamming
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.
[not] being considerate to others
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.
not sharing right-wing extremist content
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.
As far as I can tell, he mostly just posts to communities that he created
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.
I will not be banning users simply because some of their beliefs could be described as right-wing
If only someone would take some time and kindly put together an effective analogy for why the issue is not his beliefs.
Is it considerate to hunt through another users profile for reasons to permaban them from all of Lemmy?
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…
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.
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.
If only someone would take some time and kindly put together an effective analogy for why the issue is not his beliefs.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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’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.
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.
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
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. That 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 mother 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.
Only to come out of the other end as a conservative propagandist.
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 dunno what they’ve done on other accounts,
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 goes in the “shit UM would say” bucket.
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.
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.
my guess is you already did look through my posts
I want you to fill in the blanks:
___ ____ __ _____ ___ ___ __ _____ ______.
if you have something to say, say it.
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.
I had actually forgotten about that guy. I blocked him a few months ago because I got tired of his incessant and biased spam.
This fucker is still around eh? I remember him single-handedly sowing discord in c/politics around the time of the election with incessant pro 3rd party spam and insane tirades of sealioning - also report abuse if I remember right. Or at least taunting people into breaking rules and subsequently reporting them. I was amazed at the time that he was allowed to remain unbanned for ages in that sub when it was very clear what he was doing.
What’s wrong with advocating for 3p vote?
Did the party komissars prohibit these discussions in DNC controlled subs?
I wouldn’t care so much if he wasn’t such a bitch about it. You want to post that stuff than own up and admit it. Fucking cryptofascist.
Based on the number of dislikes I have to imagine that someone out there might have made reports which were probably and unfortunately ‘handled/managed’ by UniversalMonk as that’s how the current moderation system works:
Currently [as of Jan 12, 2025]
If a report is sent, both the community moderator(s) and admin(s) are able to see and handle the report.- This has the unfortunate side effect where if the moderator has no qualms and dismisses the report it can become unlikely that anyone would know what’s going on.
The user who made the report might then unfortunately think that the admin(s) are condoning the post/content that’s shared on their platform which might not actually be the case.
At this point this I’m just going to ask that if anyone has any posts or comments that they’d like to report, please feel free to also shoot me a Direct Message (DM). I’m preempt and say that while I can’t promise that I’ll respond immediately, I can at least guarantee that I’ll reply back saying that I have seen your message.
from 2 different accounts
So … block the all of the entire two accounts and be done with it?
Until he creates 3 more.
That also defeats the argument of banning him as he can just keep creating accounts
It blows my mind that the admins of UniversalMonk-affected servers don’t just ban him on sight.
Guys: You’re being too nice. I get it, you want to be inclusive. But you have to draw lines. Someone doesn’t have to be telling racist jokes or something, in order to be clearly and unapologetically a net negative to the community in every possible sense. And, showing them firmly to the door doesn’t have to be a complex or “objective” process when that happens.
Nah, this whole trend to censor anything and everything that isn’t exactly what you want to see is worse for the community.
I say leave him alone. I don’t have him blocked. I don’t ever see his content unless I actually do search to see what he’s been up to (spoiler: he was a far right nutbag all along the end). Even IF he is spamming articles, that behaviour can be modded by communities he isn’t modding for, and those he is modding for can be blocked. Hell if he pisses you off specifically you can block him yourself already! This isn’t a community needs to step in issue.
just like I said the other day.
https://lemmy.world/comment/14424566
in a year Lemmy will be a cesspool of extremist thoughts and opinions. left, right, doesn’t matter.
the average Lemmy user is become far more caustic towards any differing opinions and that directly increases the toxicity of the platform.
this is why mods are trying to be pedantic about the rules in communities, but unfortunately they’re only accelerating it.
they’re removing all the content under “incivility” that calls out or questions bullshit yet leaving toxic misinformation up because it breaks “no rules”.
Yeah man I feel like I’m taking crazy pills, I literally haven’t seen a single thing this dude has posted in months and all these people chiming in like he’s flooding their feeds. Like why the fuck are they subscribed to his communities in the first place???
Like why the fuck are they subscribed to his communities in the first place???
They browse the All feed.
For additional context on the previous ban on LW: https://lemmy.world/post/21115183
How many of this comment do I need to respond to?
You guys aren’t even trying to make it make sense. Moderators blocked him, so he made new communities of his own. Then people blocked him and instances banned him, so he made new accounts. Now he’s showing up again for people who have taken the steps you describe. He is actively evading people’s attempts to not have to listen to him. He talks about how proud he is of himself for doing it.
How many of this comment do I need to respond to?
As many as it takes to get you to understand censorship is a worse means. UM can ‘evade’ all he wants but he can’t take away your unsubscribe and block buttons. Did you know they aren’t single use? Amazing!
Did you know you can’t take away my “asking the admins to ban an obvious and incredibly energetic troll” buttons, either?
Also take note of [email protected] aka “conservative”
OK so you think every lemm.ee user is a nazi or something?
No but only few of them. I didnt see its users commenting getting mad everytime they see some news posts against the cons
And “NaziParty” did get almost all of their posts downvoted
I also see the communities with the same name in http://sh.itjust.works/ and http://lemmy.world/, all with the same users and downvotes
oh, that tard’s still around? I blocked him months ago.
I can affirm my experience has been all the better for it, so yes, the rest of the fediverse should throw the Nazi out of the bar.
In that case I also nominate @[email protected] who pretends to be left but posts an incredible amount of conservative propaganda and misinformation in all his little communities.
Ask them about Ukraine to get a good idea of what they stand for.
I’ll drink to that!
Eh, I just had a run-in with them again.
Trying to get every instance to ban them is a little crazy tbh, and I think you’re right that their entire goal is a blend of trolling and misinformation.
It isn’t crazy because they’re acting in bad faith. It’s crazy because just lemmy is already too big to try and organize a lemmy wide ban. Trying to get a fediverse wide one applied ain’t happening.
Best you can do is report them for the spamming in the instances they do it on.
Best you can do is report them for the spamming in the instances they do it on.
I’ve made a separate comment here that explains why this might not work as they are the moderator for the communities that they created.
Reports don’t just go to mods, they go to admins as well. And you can usually contact admins in other ways on most instances.
Reports don’t just go to mods, they go to admins as well.
You’re not wrong. Again however if the mod dismisses the report, the admin(s) would be unaware of the report unless they check the All tab. On P.D. anyways the report queue defaults to Unread, not sure if that can be changed on the newer instance versions.
And you can usually contact admins in other ways on most instances.
Again true, however [a user who’s already made a report] is it highly likely that they’d message the admins for an update? maybe?
It’s a non-zero possibility, but for my own report experience I actually just send a report and forget about it (unless I’m personally looking and pondering the reports queued on P.D’s report page, earlier last year I tried to send messages to users who made reports saying thank yous or updates on what happened to their reports).
For any users here please comment if you’ve asked for an update I’m actually genuinely curious what the frequency is.
Edit:
Ah right I just remembered that I wanted to request for a feature that community moderators can’t dismiss the report that’s made about them. This is the same copyright loophole system that exists in Youtube.
