Link: https://checkfirst.network/roska-bridge-how-a-pro-russian-ims-exploits-vulnerabilities-of-decentralised-platforms-to-spread-propaganda/

A new investigation reveals how a sophisticated Russian information manipulation set (IMS), dubbed “Roska Bridge”, uses alternative and decentralised social media platforms as a weapon to flood Western and domestic Russian audiences with aggressive, anti-Western, and anti-Ukrainian propaganda.

Here is the full report: Roska Bridge - How a pro-Russian IMS exploits vulnerabilities of decentralised platforms to spread propaganda (pdf)

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Active since at least September 2025, this IMS has disseminated several coordinated campaigns by strategically exploiting architectural flaws in the decentralised Fediverse (Mastodon) and uses the Brid.gy service to cross-post simultaneously on Bluesky and on Mastodon. Targeting countries such as Ukraine, France, Germany and the United States, the content related to this IMS also promotes Max, a Russian state-backed messenger requiring a Russian phone number to operate, suggesting it targets domestic Russian audiences as well as Western ones.

By laundering content from EU-sanctioned Russian media outlets (such as the Pravda network, Russia Today, and Sputnik) and using automated accounts with seemingly AI-generated features, this IMS has managed to establish a highly organized and coordinated infrastructure to circumvent content moderation and legal regulations.

During the investigation, researchers found hundreds of Mastodon accounts during our research, “bridging” all their publications to Bluesky in coordinated waves, with new batches of accounts activated each month, remaining active for short, intense bursts, before disappearing and being replaced. Those accounts are still running on ten Mastodon instances, including the original instance mastodon.social, which gathers over 870,000 users, and bridged to hundreds of accounts on Bluesky.

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Web Archive link

Just two weeks ago I saw a comment "it's good that we're small, therefore no one is going to bother with propaganda/information warfare". Funny

Propaganda is always and everywhere

[Looks suspiciously at .ml]

Vulnerabilities? It's an entire instance!

How can we strengthen communities against these kind of attacks? Not just the blatant bot waves but also the subtle manipulation and influence. I swear I see it happen here where there will be a single account posting hundreds of low quality articles from the most random sites and all with extreme headlines and all the posts theme around 1 specific thing. Even though they sit there getting 0 engagement they are influencing the people who scroll by.

You can't.

This isn't anything new, it just evolved to the digital age. All you can do it fact check and verify. Propaganda happens on both sides and we are stuck in the middle.

This is a major blind spot to the fediverse and it was easily exploited several years ago, when a disgruntled hacker made a bunch of accounts on unsecured misskey instances and used them to spam the whole network via federation. People tried to defederate from the instances, but the attacker eventually started spinning up his own. All he needed was to ensure at least one user on another instance would see his new instances.

Russia and other NSA's could easily use the same strategy: no effective countermeasure was developed, the attacker simply got bored and stopped.

Indeed.

It won't be no one but clearly this platform isn't (yet) a cesspool for it like other platforms have become.

We're going to have to start treating it like email with anti spam filtering and reputation. Things like rspamd are very advanced with a lot of signals that it uses.

Right now, the best part of the Fediverse is its weakest point: federation. I can easy spin up my own instance, connect it to lemmy.world and start posting. I can create accounts to make it look legitimate and it takes admins on one or more instance to first start banning individual accounts, then realize the entire instance should be banned. I can then create more domains if I want to. Lemmy.world uses CloudFlare's anti-bot (which has its privacy ramifications) but that can be trivially be bypassed with federation.

I've been thinking Lemmy needs automated anti spam (content filtering) that then feeds into user and instance reputation to automatically flag domains, IPs, etc.

Look at the recent posts about Reddit's anti-spam practices, it has the advantage of a single system able to collect a lot of metrics. Unfortunately you kind of need it to fight advanced spammers.

won't someone think of the children! this is why blocking is good. block bs. its fine to treat online like you would the real world.