Hello

We have seen a small resurgence in group ‘raids’ where a large number of accounts join a group with a few occasionally sending explicit or inflammatory content.

This falls outside our project scope for listing accounts. Many accounts used are bots. But, we wanted to make a PSA on how to handle raids where a large number of users are joining at once.

If your group is in the middle of a raid follow these steps.

1. If your group is public (has an @) do not make it private. Your group username will be stolen.

2. Go into the permissions menu under group settings and disable users ability to add members. You can also disable all users ability to send media or post messages temporarily here if content is being spammed.

3. Turn on ‘approve new members’ if your group is public.

4. If your group is private revoke the main invite link.

5. Go through every issued invite link (they should be in the group settings) and turn on the ‘approve new members’ setting or revoke the link.

6. You should see new joins slow. Even if you don’t, begin clean-up.

7. Once the raid is over make sure to re-enable anything you’ve disabled such as allowing users to add other members or post.

It will still be slightly annoying and require some clean up, but these steps should help minimize the impact of these sorts of trolls.

<<PLEASE SHARE THIS INFORMATION WITH ADMINISTRATORS OF PUBLIC GROUPS IN WHICH YOU ENJOY MEMBERSHIP. THE MORE THIS INFORMATION SPREADS, THE SAFER ALL WILL BE.>>

The European Union is close to passing a Chat Control bill which would mandate the scanning of all end-to-end encrypted messages. This would mean the government and police can read everything you ever send to anyone regardless of where you send it and to who.

You can learn more about how to fight against it here: https://fightchatcontrol.eu/ and you can learn more about the bill here: https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-control/ and here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NyUgv6dpJc

Even if you are not an EU Citizen please share this with your friends and family who may live there, if the EU can pass this, once again it means your country can too, so we must stop chat control laws being passed anywhere to protect not just other's privacy but our own privacy. The UK age law is a infamous example right now, where many US states are following the UK's lead in implementing similar restrictions, for instance.

If your representative or government supports it do not give up, contact them showing your opposition. Enough people fighting will make a change. Share this with everyone you can, friends, family, neighbors. Our privacy depends on it.