there’s a “news” account for everythingAs the Bluesky social media platform’s population grows, so too does the platform’s value as a target for various types of spam, manipulation, and shenanigans. One interesting example that has popped up in the opening months of 2024 is a network of hundreds of eerily similar-looking “news” accounts, allegedly covering myriad scintillating topics ranging from “Ecology News” and “Building News” to “Poison News” and “Assassination News”. These accounts follow each other and regularly repost one another’s content, which consists almost exclusively of links to videos and news articles, and features no original reporting.these “news” accounts follow a bunch of very similar “news” accountsA quick peek at the Following tab of any of these accounts reveals a multitude of additional obscure “news” accounts, which provides a convenient way to locate more accounts and map out the network. In the case of this particular network, excluding false positives is straightforward as, unlike real users who sign up for social media platforms to disseminate or read news, these accounts do not follow media organizations, journalists, podcasters, social media influencers, or friends. Instead, they all follow more or less the same list of hundreds of accounts — the other members of the network. The display names of most of the accounts contain the word “News”, frequently parenthesized. this graph contains 122899 edges, which is why you can’t see any of themRecursively exploring the set of accounts followed by an initial seed account (“TRUMP (News)”, trumpnews.bsky.social) yields 387 accounts. Each…All the news that's fit to spam