• Lucius Finkter@piefed.social
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    16 hours ago

    Blowing up data centers will not stop troll farms. Troll traffic is not coming from Yandex.

    Some of the claims appear to conflate data centers with Russian “troll farms” such as the Internet Research Agency (IRA), which became well-known following a 2015 expose. The IRA operated out of a St. Petersburg office building, not a datacenter operated by Yandex. Nor does there appear to be any particular reason the IRA would require an inordinate amount of network resources.

    • redballooon@lemmy.world
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      13 hours ago

      That’s one instance of a troll farm from 11 years ago.

      Surely nowadays these troll farms are LLM powered instead of human powered and of course need compute power.

      Where the humans sit that orchestrate these bot networks is another topic.

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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        7 hours ago

        Surely nowadays these troll farms are LLM powered instead of human powered and of course need compute power.

        Where is the lion’s share of LLM compute located?

      • manuallybreathing@lemmy.ml
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        10 hours ago

        Surely

        Trust me bro, it’s the vibe

        There’s been a spike recently in australia of people paying Indonesians to post right wing content, half the time a company is using AI they’re actually just paying people in the third world pennies for posting

        a lot of this stuff is propaganda on behalf of ai companies, ai is scary! Ai is evil! Ai is powerful! lol

      • jj4211@lemmy.world
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        7 hours ago

        I don’t know about that.

        Feels like there’s a high risk of the LLM going off script and going against the points they are trying to make.

        Just like Trump’s AI site saying the 2020 election was not stolen.

        • 🇨🇦GreenBeard🇨🇦@lemmy.ca
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          7 hours ago

          Do you not see that daily? There’s nothing internally consistent or coherent about 3/4 of what bots post, it’s just garbage that sounds plausibly human.

      • zqps@sh.itjust.works
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        12 hours ago

        Yeah the idea that they would just route their traffic from a regular office network connection is truly stupid.

    • kbobabob@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      13 hours ago

      Blowing up data centers will not stop troll farms

      I didn’t think that is their goal. I thought their goal was to get Russia to leave their country.

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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        7 hours ago

        I thought their goal was to get Russia to leave their country.

        Well… it’s to debilitate the Russian economy until Russians can no longer force-project across the border.

        But anyone who believes Yandex was the soft underbelly of Moscow is going to be disappointed. Russian troops aren’t going to leave because a data center got lit up. On the contrary, this becomes further agitation within Russia to spend an increasing amount of domestic wealth and civilian lives flinging firebombs at Ukrainian infrastructure. With the intended goal of debilitating the Ukrainian economy until Ukrainians can no longer force-project over the border.

        This is purely a war of attrition. There’s no target either side could hit that would end it, prior to a national political realignment or a wholesale economic collapse. Even if one side managed to dome off Putin or Zelensky, the war would drag on under their immediate successors.

      • DBT@feddit.online
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        10 hours ago

        Yea, but troll farms influence US elections, and US elections play a role in the war in Ukraine.

        An example of this would be Trump deciding to buy diesel from Russia, which helps Russia fund their war against Ukraine.

        So stopping troll farms can help work towards the goal of getting Russia to leave their country.

    • betanumerus@lemmy.ca
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      11 hours ago

      “stop” …

      … and I suppose arresting a Russian soldier will not “stop” Putin? … and eating one apple will not “stop” cancer? … and pressing your brake pedal will not “stop” the US rate of road accidents? … and doing a single push-up will not win you an olympic medal?

      … and posting one lame comment will not “stop” others from indentifying reliable sources?

      🤣