I have no context for this and thought it was an April fools joke left up but no, this is a real problem here?
this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2025
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I think I've gotten about 5 messages in total. Multiply that across the fediverse, and that's potentially a lot of irritation.
I just got my first one a couple days ago so yeah. It's pretty widespread.
To clarify for others, as I have no interest in doing this myself, but if people feel like sharing, are they allowed to do so provided they censor the pictire/remove it entirely from a screenshot? Not sure why someone would, but I figure it doesn't hurt to ask.
potentially identifying information, such as addresses, must be removed. images of the person must either be heavily pixelated or entirely cut out.
This annoys the fuck out of me and I hope whoever is behind it doesn't realize their goals, because I don't want lemmy to degrade into a bunch of spam PMs.
I finally got one a week ago. Have many of you gotten them?
I got my first one last night. Yay! I'm part of the thing now!
There's an entire community of people who get them. I think it's called c/Nicole's but likely shitting down now. Some people were getting up to tens per day.
Jfc I got my first today and was like βoh wow itβs real.β Canβt believe some people are getting multiple a day. That would be annoying as hell
I've been thinking this since it started and saying it for a bit. I don't understand at all how there were memes of this on the front page all the time and it took this long to do even this. Has there been any attempt at an effort to notify whoever is in the picture that this is happening? I would like to help if possible.
might make sense to notify the educational institution she was said to be attending.
I think "notify her" feeds the harassment they're referring to, even if contacting her is well intended
Who is Nicole and why should I care?
It's a lemmy specific spam where someone's pretending to be a girl from Canada and calling themselves Nicole. Mostly through private messages tho.
Not just Lemmy, they followed me on mastodon.
I can't believe I managed to never get one of these spam messages. I didn't even know what a Nicole was until the week or two ago.
Don't say it out loud! I said the same thing a couple weeks ago, and it's a weekly thing now.
I heard people talking about it, but just got the message last week. It felt strangely like an initiation. There's even a link to a discord. I'm terribly curious what goes on there, but don't want to risk whatever possible ramifications of joining a prolific spammer's Discord server.
It felt strangely like an initiation.
don't mystify
Don't tell other people how to think.
The community should also be burned to the ground. If it still exists.
Which community...?
[email protected] could be what he means. The comm was locked after the gore picture was spammed.
Yeah this one.
Glad to see there's effort being taken to stop this, as someone who's been harassed in a similar way on here it really kind of bugs me that people are making light of this or assume that the original person is the one doing this. Impersonation is frighteningly easy on the Fediverse and I really wish they'd add some kind of verification in Lemmy like they do in Mastodon to try and minimize the impact of it.
I question if it is even harassment since there was no contact info beyond the sender in the messages I got with this pic. There was no identifying info, etc. It seemed like someone just sent me a random photo and it was very bizarre.
A picture of someone's face is identifying info. That's why we put faces on IDs and show pictures of missing people - it literally identifies them.
I think the concern is users feeling compelled to find this women's name and information and then contacting her thinking they are helping, and then multiply that by the dozens, hundreds, or thousands.
Yeah, it's likely this. Mix in a couple malicious actors looking to ruin her life on top of the spam, and it's a PR disaster for Lemmy, just waiting to happen.
WTF is a Nicole image
Edit: After seeing responsesβ¦. I got it weeks ago but just ignored it as spam and didnβt even read it. The pic jogs my memory
Nicole AKA the fediverse girl/chick
How long have you been here? I've only been here a few weeks and got no fewer than ten of these messages.
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