I spent 72 hours checking the posting times of every Gazan account I saw fundraising. More than 2/3 of them were inconsistent with Gaza but consistent with Myanmar or Cambodia, where hundreds of thousands of people are trafficked into doing scam work under threat of violence or death.
and before you get hot under the collar about that statement: it's 4AM in Gaza right now and I am watching two separate accounts post their gofundme in somebody's thread every 10 seconds. as @rahaeli.bsky.social notes: it's 9AM in Southeast Asia, though. people are being had. I'm sorry.
Of the rest, a chunk were posting in US/UK time, there were a number of the full total that posted too irregularly or were too new to draw firm conclusions about, and 18% of the total were posting consistent with actual Gaza time. Because every time I say this, I am accused of genocide denial -- hence the interactions disabled -- I will unequivocally state that Israel's actions in Gaza are horrific and the people of Gaza deserve safety, security, and justice for the devastation they are surviving. Me pointing out that only 18% of the accounts I checked in that 3-day time frame showed metadata consistent with being located in Gaza is not a statement that Gazans are not suffering or that they do not deserve help. It is, however, a statement that 82% of the accounts I saw engaged in mass posting/contact behavior in a 3-day window were, using the tools available for analysis, significantly unlikely to be from Gaza. (And when I was in the slightest bit of doubt, I counted them as authentic.) As I first said a year ago, if a site allows any relaxation of spam enforcement for what they consider a good cause, the organized worldwide spam industry will instantly pivot to exploiting that good cause, and that is precisely what has happened, both on Bluesky and on other sites. If you are going to be angry, be angry the spam cartels have managed to divert so much money that people want to go to aiding Gazans into supporting human trafficking! And, of course, angry at the crisis that means pretending to be a Gazan in need is a successful tactic for them to engage in. I should also belatedly add, before people once again accuse me of saying things I am not saying, that the sampling method for this analysis was "accounts I saw engaged in reply contact through my standard use of the site" and not any systemic attempt to locate or identify accounts. I do not look for Gazan accounts. I do not list or report Gazan accounts. I personally block the ones I see so any replies to me will not appear to someone reading my threads who may report them. I do not think people should engage in systemic reporting. There are many instances of genuine Palestinian people who are using reply contact to try to raise money to survive. These people are real and desperate and they deserve better systems of aid than begging to strangers on the internet for survival. The way to help them is not to demand that a site build exceptions to their spam policy for accounts that engage in behavior indistinguishable from the spam cartels, because if that happens, the spam cartels will use those exceptions to overwhelm the site with accounts that pretend to be them. Which is exactly what has happened, and which is why accounts that legitimately belong to Palestinians in need are removed for engaging in the same behavior. Spam detection systems detect and remove spam.