“I’ve never seen anything like it” says Dan Doonerson, top analyst and co-founder of the Democratic Institute of Misinformation.

“There’ really no words for how brazen it all is” an exasperated Doonerson said. “Somehow, this got by us and allowed the election to go off the rails and, frankly, it’s a failure of my entire industry allowing this to slip by.”

Lemmy, the “federated” website collective Donnerson specializes in, was founded in 2019 by Dessalines, a shadowy figure in the already shady dark web world. While the site claims to be free and open-source, many have called the source of its funding into question as well as the national origins of its development team.

Shortly before the beginning of the U.S. election season, lemmy experienced a surge in popularity, the cause of which is not known for certain. Many, including analysts at Doonerson’s organization, have reason to believe Russian meddling in popular American social media websites, especially reddit, led to the spike in interest.

“This seems to reflect a recent trend in the media consumption habits of Americans and its hard to believe the timing isn’t suspect” says Doonerson. “However, while more right wing populists have sought an escape from ‘woke media’, lemmy seems to cater to an extremist embrace of liberal woke politics and its hard to find the differences in the results.”

Doonerson and the Democratic Institute for Disinformation began ringing the alarm bells on Lemmy in late 2023. Donnerson claims misinformation and election interference operations were already well on their way by that time; “By then it was already too late and many still wouldn’t listen”.

“The center of Lemmy’s operations is a central collective of a few separate communities with similar content and intentions, namely ‘comms’ located on Hexbear, the area of lemmy with the most activity.”

Hexbear, an oddly named site federated with the Lemmy collective, is a extremist far-left site with similarly opaque command structures and moderation policies. As the most active instance, it’s most active comms quickly became of interest to Doonerson.

“We’ve noticed a large amount of irregular activity on comms such as ‘the dunk tank’, ‘the dredge tank’, and of course ‘fake news’. It’s dumbfounding they were able to get away with this for so long and, as many suspect, it goes much deeper than we thought”.

However, Doonerson states, the Democratic Institute for Misinformation has made many efforts recently to curtail the spread and influence of these instances in order to bring democratic values back to the forefront of progressive politics. “Obviously we can’t say much, but we’ve found many effective methods for controlling the site culture and steering many would be extremists and unwitting propagandists back into the fold of society”.