How Sybil Attacks Affect Social Media Startups. A Tru Story.
Last night, TruStory experienced its first Sybil attack. In a Sybil attack, one person creates multiple accounts in order to exploit a network. In the case of TruStory, one person created multiple accounts and then had his accounts constantly agree with the arguments created across his other accounts, thus artificially boosting how much it seemed like people agreed with his arguments.

This attack came after the single largest day of growth for the application. The growth was largely driven by a hotly contested claim that was the featured debate: feminism is a greater threat to humanity than climate change.

As one might guess, this claim attracted a crowd with incredibly diverse perspectives. Growth for a social media company always brings in people with varying view points. In particular, the one person performing the Sybil attack went on to create a slew of accounts with controversial, and to be quite frank, outright racist/antisemitic, names:

Accounts created by single person

Here is an example of an argument made by one of the attacker’s accounts:

We want to be clear that the TruStory community did not downvote this user’s arguments because of the content itself. The TruStory community is not against users posting controversial arguments and having those arguments be discussed in a productive manner in accordance to the values of TruStory.

The primary reason the community downvoted this user’s arguments was because the attacker had created accounts purely for the intent of upvoting their own arguments, which in turn would artificially accrue him TRU points and make it seem like more people agreed with his arguments.

This sort of behavior goes against the values and mission of TruStory, as the community wants TruStory to be a place where people can have productive debate on controversial topics without artificial manipulation.

We are creating mechanisms to ensure that users cannot easily create a significant amount of accounts to constantly agree with each respective account’s arguments.

TruStory is all about bringing people to together discuss controversial issues in a rational manner. Come see what other hot debates are happening now!
['Mattison Asher']
['Social Media', 'Technology', 'Debate', 'Startup Lessons', 'Startup']