1021
Homeland Security Spying on Reddit Users: Leak show feds tracking anti-ICE Reddit users like "Budget-Chicken-2425"
(www.kenklippenstein.com)
this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2026
1021 points (99.0% liked)
Technology
80916 readers
4108 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Is Homeland Security chasing bots? Because that’s the bottiest name I’ve ever seen. If so, please continue. 🍿
I find it odd, but a lot of newer users on Reddit go with the default suggested username and those follow the
word-word-0000template.At the same time, it might be better for privacy to do that since it's less likely that someone can track you across platforms if you use the generator built into each platform.
I did that with my new user. It’s easier to use an account for a year or two and burn it. I don’t care about the fake points. And I am not doing anything wrong. But if tou give a lot of oppinions it’s a lot of data for social engineering, so for privacy reason it’s a good practice to not be attached to any account.
Fair enough. Maybe I’m too old for the internet.
Maybe the internet truly is... No Country for Old Men...
Its been a long time since you could build relationships with other users in places like Reddit. The usernames don't matter anymore so you may as well just use randoms. Your just going to get banned and make a new one anyways.
it has been flooded with bots since '16, when russia got involved with reddit through propaganda. so people are quite suspicious around other users, accusing them bots.
How can lemmy avoid that fate, if it ever gets really popular?
I see it a lot, too. Reddit's been around for 20 years, so all the good usernames are already taken.
I think the current flow for Reddit account creation is they give you the auto generated username and you have to change it when you're done creating the account. You don't get to set it during creation. So because it's an extra step I think some people don't. (Though I may be misremembering. It's been years since I used it.)
thats how they mass-create bot accounts, just create a large number without carefully making one that reddit wont immediately ban you on.
Hey, wait a minute...
yes, and PALINTIR is active on reddit using propaganda bots, along side the russian and MOSSAD ones.
I don't disbelieve it, do you recall where you read that?
I had a similar names. I didn't care about "expressing myself" and didn't want you link it to myself in any way, so every time I would just accept the random gibberish reddit suggests when creating a new account.
Like my current RailcarXxxx username. It was just suggested I think when creating my first Lemmy, and just reused it through instances
Yeah now I'm kind of worried about my pseudonym. This isn't my first pseudonym mind you, and it won't be the last, but this is the most "well known" around my internet friends.
Reddit suggested usernames are always dumb shit like that.