• UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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    7 hours ago

    I was going to say… Does anyone genuinely believe we’re going to see fewer bots by late October? As though we didn’t have a bumper crop of them run out of American datacenters?

    Does anyone seriously believe “the bots are gone, so I shouldn’t accuse anyone on the internet of being a bot anymore”? Or are we going to see the same “Bad Take = Russian NPC” response every time someone with an .ml origin says something that sets a .world local account on tilt?

    • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      5 hours ago

      It doesn’t actually make sense for Russia to be running their Digital Propaganda agents from Russian IP addresses unless they’re trying to make it easy for the likes of Meta and Twitter to just block them.

      I mean, all you have to do is ponder for a few seconds on - “what would I do if I was a propagandist from an adversary nation trying to covertly influence citizens in other nations?”. The immediate, obvious thing is “I wouldn’t makes it stupidly obvious for the counter-intel people on the other side who owns them by hosting the fucking bots in my own country”.

      It makes sense for them to have Command & Control in Russia, but not the actual bots.

    • SupraMario@lemmy.world
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      7 hours ago

      You tankies don’t need to be called bots, you do that shit all on your own. The fediverse and Lemmy is way to small for russia to give a shit about it. You guys spew tankie shit for free for them.

      • tottle@lemmy.ca
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        2 hours ago

        If you’re a propagandist then there’s value in being active in niche social media networks. It makes you a big fish in a small pond, and if the social network for some reason blows up then you’d be one of the early adopters which will give you more influence. For example Ghislaine Macwell was a moderator on Reddit, but apparently also Voat iirc, which is an obscure Reddit clone that never had a big user base

      • BigPotato@lemmy.world
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        6 hours ago

        I’ve seen Russian Propaganda pushed to outlets with single digit reach. It’s like they’re subscribed to Meltwater for niche outlets or something. I wouldn’t put it past them to have a guy or two who exclusively earn their paychecks shitposting here.