Replying to @⁨hanrahan@slrpnk.net⁩

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?

Replying to @⁨UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world⁩

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.