Some.
Keep it up, dude.
Based Zelenskyy!
silenced Yandex crawler bots,. indexing for their search engine, not social media bots
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?
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.
Why would Meta or Twitter block them?
Well if the c&c or individual VPS of the people are down, the bots will run out of tasks eventually no matter where they are hosted from.
I just assumed it was all the VPSs and it only would be 1 day before they fixed the routing. Those DC were only being used as infrastructure for routing traffic out of Russia.
It’s as likely the C&C for Russian Government Propaganda ops is in Yandex data centers as it is that NSA personnel are working from Amazon data centers.
Security services don’t base their personnel or their user-facing machines in commercial data-centers.
Right, but they can host the infrastructure these people use to do their jobs, like in the article?
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.
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
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.
The fediverse and Lemmy is way to small for russia to give a shit about it.
Thats not true
That’s the claim but where’s the evidence. I’m not going around pretending the enemy is diminished when it’s actually not.
Exactly this. I keep reading all of the stuff posted about this and I have yet to see evidence. And in fact, while i’m not a security expert, I am a hosting expert, and I can tell you: That is not how they operate. They obfuscate their origin as much as possible, else it would be trivial to filter them and block them.
I respect Ukraine and Zelenskyy, but I think this claim is untrue.
When laypeople read a diplomatic statement and take it at face value it’s a good sign they’re media illiterate or just want what was said to be true desperately, reality be damned. I know Zelensky is fighting a war and puffing his chest saying shit to look strong. That’s fine it’s his job as wartime leader.
I’m Albertan so I’m feeling rather paranoid about letting my guard down is all.
That thread was removed and OP admitted it’s ChatGPT generated slop in the comments.
Could use this source: https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots/ru?dateRange=7d
Like Yandex only is: https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots/as13238?dateRange=7d
But again that’s all traffic not just potential political disinfo bots so this still doesn’t really tell me anything other than Yandex data centers got blown up.
Distrust what you’re fed by TV and the press, and to think for yourself rather than accepting any official narratives these days.
I have a (former?) friend who says that. He’s fully addicted to algorithm-induced rage. He sends me 3 or 4 Islamophobic and/or Zionist videos from Instagram or X or Facebook every day for some reason.
That’s not what I meant 😂
Well, you see, a lot of people have been convinced that Denialism or at best Non-Mainstreamism (a word I just made up) is the same as Skepticism and think they’re the latter when they’re mainly one or both of the former, not understanding that you have to actually think hard to be a Skeptic (as it’s mostly about logically and analytically testing what you are told before accepting it or rejecting it, and it’s definitely not just rejecting everything), not just engage in the low-cognitive near-brainless activities of criticizing everything and/or choose a side whose words one unthinkingly trusts that somehow is supposedly non-mainstream (hence “it’s not the same” as most people when they choose a side whose words they unthinkingly trust).
In a way it’s funny how human stupidity and the far too common lack of self-awareness and introspection have been weaponized in not just one but actually several ways to the point that even people who think themselves as “rebellious” are being led by the nose just like most of the rest.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
Yeah the idea that they would just route their traffic from a regular office network connection is truly stupid.
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.
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.
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.
And yet /r/conservative went silent. Just like the last time Russian bot farms were targeted.
/r/conservative went silent
The sub has purged itself so many times, I don’t even know who still has the rights to post there.
Nevertheless, I’m seeing new content as recent as 47 minutes ago. Plenty of posts in the last two hours. The same meager activity from a community that has kicked itself in the dick so many times that it no longer has a user base to speak of.
I respectfully disagree, more data centers should be destroyed, the Russian one currently should take priority
I’m not opposed to blowing up data centers in general, just saying…
“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?
🤣
If even the US’ Cold War anti-communist propaganda station ‘Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’ states the drop is likely due to Yandex’s crawlers, what does that tell you about the credibility of Zelenskyy (having an obvious conflict of interest) and all Western outlets running with it, by extension? The Russian government might not even need bot farms at this stage, because the West keeps undermining their own credibility: with single-sided, unsubstantiated malinformation of half-truths at best. It’s so obvious to me they’re trying to pass off any critical thinker as being a Russian troll, and trying to escalate the proxy-war by attributing “hybrid-war” sabotages to the “aggressor” (that is conveniently in a weakened state because of it). Yes, Russia undeniably invaded Ukraine, but wouldn’t the US do the same to Mexico if it turned communist, following all of South-America?
reads part of comment
looks at user
oh…it’s an ml account.
@wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz already made that “argument”, if you can call it that. How about meaningfully interacting, instead of disregarding based on something irrelevant?
Typical .ml user.
It’s so obvious to me they’re trying to pass off any critical thinker as being a Russian troll, and trying to escalate the proxy-war by attributing “hybrid-war” sabotages to the “aggressor”
Weak attempt at obfuscation. Nobody thinks “critical thinkers” are russian trolls; quite the opposite.
Weak attempt at obfuscation. Nobody thinks “critical thinkers” are russian trolls; quite the opposite.
Oh, some (very few, IMHO) people will definitely call others “Russian Troll” or equivalent if they point out that Russian interference has far less power than the very much local ultra-rich, politicians and News-media owners when it comes to the current state of most Western nations and that it’s more likely that loudly raging about “foreign interference” is a political propaganda tool of mainstream politicians - a scapegoat for the consequences of the pillaging of the West by ultra-wealthy Westerns (paralleling how “immigrants” are similarly used as scapegoats by other mainstream politicians - they’re both very much “blame foreigners”) that said politicians very much supported and still support.
Also, don’t get me started on how the interference of other nations is much larger and more open - for example both main parties in the US and UK openly have groups amongst their “parliamentarians” who are “Friends of Israel”.
Russia almost certainly interfered or tried to, because it makes sense for them to do so and it’s very much how they’ve always operated, it’s just that it stretches belief to blame them for most of what’s going on, especially in light of the explosion in inequality, crash in social mobility, collapse in job security (mostly in Europe, the US was always so) and so on in the last couple of decades of Neoliberal political dominance that are for more likely to explain growing discontent and the News-media owned by billionaires very openly pushing far-right ideations 24/7.
In bigger countries foreigners generally don’t have the kind of influence that locals do, especially the wealthy and well-connected ones.
As I see it, there are definitely multiple manipulation machines in operation out there nowadays and multiple muppets whose brains are only big enough for simple explanations and who have have fallen for the slop some of them feed and will gladly spout their simplemindedness here.
That said a person who writes “The Russian government might not even need bot farms at this stage, because the West keeps undermining their own credibility” (amongst other such “jewels”) like the previous poster did clearly doesn’t fall into the “critical thinker” category.
You seem to be creating this false dichotomy between “kremlin involvement” and “western oligarchs,” but you don’t seem to see how deeply the two are interconnected, and obscuring that connection only benefits both.
If you genuinely aren’t aware, pull some of the threads and you’ll see what I mean. Look into the connections between the kremlin and political movements like maga, reform UK, AfD, Fidesz, and other similar subversive right-wing extremist elements. As well as media personalities ranging from Fox News hosts to right-wing influgrifters.
Like I’m not trying to polish the turd that is homegrown western extremism, but denying the ties it has to kremlin influence would be as counterproductive as denying the influence that states like Israel have over establishment candidates through more official channels such as AIPAC.
In either case, writing that off as “blaming foreigners” is not a compelling argument. This isn’t like blaming hispanic and/or middle-eastern immigrants for the woes of the working class. This is about criticizing deliberate, orchestrated hybrid warfare techniques of an adversarial nation-state actor who doesn’t even try to deny that they’re doing it, and openly states that their goal is to destroy the west from within.
You can say “well the west deserves it for being evil,” but the fact is most western countries
havehad systems that were capable of improving themselves incrementally from within; what we end up post-dismantlement is practically an anarcho-capitalist financial olichary/kleptocracy similar to the current governing system russia has; in which all the worst elements dominate any redeeming factors that may have existed, and we end up with the resurgence of fascism that we’re seeing today.It already worked in the US. Europe got their shit together and it seems their fascist movements are petering out. Not entirely gone, but not looming like the dark clouds on the horizon before a tempest like they seemed to be doing before.
The irony here is that the “blame foreigners” parties are almost entirely all the very same extremist elements who receive funding and support from kremlin propaganda agencies. So again, framing this as “blaming foreigners” falls way short.
And your argument? You’re only disregarding me for using an instance with a reasonable policy, and for what you consider Russian bot traffic, which is exactly the point I’m trying to make; whether or not you consider that of a critical thinker.
Removed by mod
Ugh. Pathetic.
And your argument as to why?
To be clear four days later there is still zero evidence this is true.
Cherry picking individuals with low engagement is not a serious analysis.
Tomshardware doesn’t show twitter account changes it talks about cloudflare traffic and expert opinions but thelondoneconimoc has a better article on the effects on e.g. Reform’s twitter.
Edit:
Here’s a quote from my above source
Take Richard Tice for example. Below are three posts on X from the Reform deputy leader to his almost 400,000 followers on Monday, 11 October. At the time of writing, none of the posts had hit triple figures for reposts or comments, with one not even reaching 10,000 views.
{…}
Before the Ukrainian strikes on the Russia data centres, Tice’s posts got considerably more engagement, consistently hitting triple figures for comments and reposts, whilst racking up hundreds of thousands of views.
typo : “thelondoneconimoc”
(( thanks for many nice and well documented comments ))
Hmmm, it seems more strikes are needed.
Libs gonna lib, hey?
Which gives exactly no evidence of a decline in social media bots.
If you actually click the source link in the article, you see that the graph shows the bot traffic from “AS13238 YANDEX — Yandex LLC”, not the internet overall. That caption was conveniently cropped. Also, those bots are very likely not the kind that post on twitter but web crawlers. Yandex is a search engine. Of course destroying its data centers stops the web crawlers running in those data centers from indexing sites.
I have yet to see an actual statistic of the amount political social media posts or active users on social media sites changing in any way.
Edit: claiming that this attack has destroyed the bot farms and giving mislabeled graphs as sources is actively harmful because it leads people to believe that everything that is left must be “real people” when it’s very likely that pretty much all of the bots are still active.
That’s why asked, because the cited source doesn’t make the same claims.
It doesn’t matter. People have already made up their minds, facts are irrelevant.
Yandex also offers Cloud Services. Just saying…
Okay, good. Now show me the statistics that show that there are actually fewer bots than last week.
Don’t get me wrong, I desperately want these news to be true. But so far every single article I’ve seen links back (directly or indirectly) to that one CloudFlare chart that doesn’t say what people think it says. Some point to a few individual posts that didn’t get many interactions. But as far as I’m aware nobody has made the effort to check if there is an actual widespread difference and which topics it affects. Right now this all seems like confirmation bias and wishful thinking. And again, I get it. We need good news now more than ever. But the only thing worse than no good news is good news that just isn’t true and leads to us letting our guard down.
This garbage analysis got deleted for a reason.
From how it was explained to me by colleagues that work with this stuff for us is that those data centers were links in a chain of vpns that many bot swarms used and when they went down their ip addresses were reveled and on many platforms that resulted in automated bans and THAT is the subjective experience of the bots being silenced
There is also zero evidence for this
People downvoting this inconvenient truth the same ones who accuse others of being propagandists.
As though somone blaming Ukraine for “refusing to negotiate peace” has any room to speak on “inconvenient truths”.
Well, on the other hand, users from .ml should be regarded as experts on avoiding inconvenient truths - their entire ideology is based off historical revisionism and “critical thinking” analysis of geopolitics.
Lmao, Stalin defeated the Nazis and beat the Americans to space.
An .ml defending Russia …
Seems like they didn’t blow up the correct data center to silence you.
Sorry, your bot is in another data center.
Everyone here is a russian bot execpt for you, Привет от Сталина.
How is that, in any way, defending Russia?
0 comments… Checks out
Based on when you posted this, there were comments 3 hours prior?
It said 0 comments when I commented. I thought it wouldn’t need explaining.
They’re probably a self censored tankiephobe
“Thankiephobe”, is this a try at Donald Derangement Syndrome 😂😂🤣😂??!
I don’t know what that is. I could look it up but I won’t. It sounds like such a stupid term, *cringe
Wow your ability to understand words using context clues is pathetic, lmao.
Yup. Too stupid
Sorry to hear it :(
Привет от Сталина
If malicious bot traffic came-out of Yandex’s data centers, its legitimated traffic would be blocked everywhere and yandex wouldn’t have been able to operate such a successful business. There are hundred’s of services that track illegitimate and dangerous bot traffic, such databases are use to block malicious crawlers, bot nets, spam bots, email spams, phishing websites, websites distributing viruses … Yandex can’t afford to allow such activities from its networks.
Just because Ukraine is the victim it doesn’t mean we should spread fake news propaganda. They failed to produce any tangible evidence, and after many sources started debunking the claims and proving the base material to be AI generated. they brought in Zelensky to give it more credibility. it is disheartening to see such fake news rise at the forefront of social media sites. and be upvoted by the masses that on other occasions were championing the fight against fake news. But as long as it fits their narratives, it is good to pass.
