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.
That mf is still around? And now they’re spamming right wing nazi stuff, despite definitely for sure being a legitimate honest 3rd party Jill Stein Stan? My gosh, say it isn’t so!
There is nothing for them to learn about “netiquette”, they are a cancerous wart intentionally participating in bad faith with the entire fediverse.
It seems like every other day they are posting from a new instance.
Removed by mod
Not as much as you’d think.
Parent bullet point is the user. Child bullet points are communities they run/ran
- https://hilariouschaos.com/u/universalmonk
- https://futurology.today/u/universalmonk
- https://lemdro.id/u/universalmonk
- https://lemmy.libertarianfellowship.org/u/universalmonk
- https://lemmy.radio/u/universalmonk
- https://eviltoast.org/u/universalmonk
- https://sh.itjust.works/u/universalmonk
- https://sh.itjust.works/c/talesfromthecrypticlemmy
- https://sh.itjust.works/c/swp
- https://sh.itjust.works/c/pierpontctc
- https://sh.itjust.works/c/politicsunfiltered
- https://sh.itjust.works/c/solarpunkstrength
- https://sh.itjust.works/c/fitchicks
- https://sh.itjust.works/c/lostscreams
- https://sh.itjust.works/c/libertariansocialism
- https://sh.itjust.works/c/esperanto
- https://slrpnk.net/u/universalmonk
- https://mander.xyz/u/universalmonk
- https://midwest.social/u/universalmonk (BANNED)
- https://lemm.ee/u/universalmonk
- https://beehaw.org/u/universalmonk (BANNED)
- https://lemmy.world/u/universalmonk (BANNED)
- https://lemmy.world/c/politicsunfiltered (TAKEN OVER BY ANOTHER MOD)
- https://lemmy.world/c/PierpontCTC
- https://lemmy.world/c/transracial
- https://lemmy.world/c/byupathway
- https://lemmy.world/c/byuidaho
- https://lemmy.world/c/swp
- https://lemmy.world/c/talesfromthecrypticlemmy
- https://lemmy.world/c/amileaday
- https://lemmy.world/c/murderhornet_100
So this is the downside of the fediverse. Having the block the same person 18 times?
That’s a long list
Removed by mod
And now they’re spamming right wing nazi stuff, despite definitely for sure being a legitimate honest 3rd party Jill Stein Stan
I fucking knew it, I commented once that he was a secret MAGAt supporter spreading FUD and bLuEMagA crap. Looks like the mask fell and guess I was right lol
oh I always knew it- maybe a week or two after they started spamming, I caught them posting 3 or 4 times in the /c/conservative comm with some VERY overtly racist articles. They did a great job ignoring me when I started calling them out on it though, very strange.
Edit: Here it was, they spammed a bunch of stuff, including that one particular article in the middle about Oregon’s housing assistance program being only for illegal immigrants (an outright lie that only existed for racist purposes):
They’re such fucking cowards.
The very fact that someone like this is “still around “ is a damned red flag about mods at this point, probably?
The mods of c/politics were so soft on this asshole that we were forced to create c/politics_no_um.
What?
I SAID, THE MODS OF C/POLITICS WERE SO SOFT ON UM THAT WE HAD TO CREATE C/POLITICS_NO_UM
!politics_no_um@lemmy.world , wild
I think UniversalMonk was a supporter of the PSL and claimed to have voted for Claudia De la Cruz.
You know, the woman who is FURIOUS that the US isn’t doing more to support Israel’s war in Gaza, and promised to rectify it and really give them the green light and finally get them all the weapons they need, if she won the presidency.(Edit: I was wrong about this. De la Cruz, as far as I can tell, opposes Israeli genocide and US support for it and supports Palestinian liberation.)
Like I say it blows my mind that he is still allowed anywhere on Lemmy. Not at all because I don’t think someone should be able to support the PSL, but because he is clearly lying for malicious reasons when he says that, among many other things.
When has Claudia De LA Cruz ever said that? As far as I know the PSL has been one of the main organizers for pro-palestinian protests in the US especially where I live along with the Palestinian youth movement. Claudia and her running partner usually at said protests. She is literally on canary mission a site used to try and silence anti-zionists. I know nothing about the person you and OP are talking about, but it seems you are just making stuff up about Claudia. If anything other than Jill Stein she was the ONLY pro-palestinian candidate(to my knowledge).
I think you are completely correct. What was I thinking of? I was sure that UM was supportive of some politician who was rabidly pro-Israel, but I thought he said he was voting for De la Cruz. You definitely seem to be right about De la Cruz being pro-Palestinian, though.
Edit: I did remember right, as far as UniversalMonk, but I was unfairly slandering Claudia De la Cruz for which I apologize. I randomly ran across it when reading the modlog just now. He voted, according to one of his deleted comments in the lemmy.world modlog, for the Socialist Worker’s Party, meaning Rachele Fruit.
As the SWP candidate for U.S. Senate from Florida last fall, Rachele Fruit spoke out against the Oct. 7 Hamas pogrom in Israel and in defense of Israel as a refuge for the Jewish people at a rally at the Holocaust Memorial in Miami Beach Oct. 10.
“The Socialist Workers Party is part of the continuity in the fight against Jew-hatred that goes back to V.I. Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. Socialists should never support any crime against humanity in the name of revolution,” she said. “Those who call themselves ‘socialists’ and who champion Hamas and other terrorist proxies of Iran will easily find themselves allied with future fascist forces.”
That’s important enough to go on their overall “here’s what our candidate is about” page. It’s not a specific story about the war in Gaza.
https://themilitant.com/2024/02/24/meet-the-socialist-workers-party-2024-candidates/
There’s also this:
https://themilitant.com/2024/10/26/defend-israel-as-a-refuge-from-jew-hatred-pogroms/
I can’t find the part where she was very upset about the United States not doing enough to support Israel in the war, but I thought I saw something about it. Anyway, she’s on Team Israel.
The important part about her that you seem to have missed, is that she isn’t a serious person/candidate, and not worth the time you wasted posting this.
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.
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 @recursive_recursion@lemmy.ca:
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- 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