posted in Technology
Ukraine's Zelenskyy Claims Strikes on Russian Data Centers Silenced Social Media Bots
gizmodo.com/ukraines-zelenskyy-claims-strikes-on-russian-data-centers-silenced-social-media-bots-2000825044
Replying to @return2ozma@lemmy.world
silenced Yandex crawler bots,. indexing for their search engine, not social media bots
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.
Replying to @Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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.
Replying to @Bane_Killgrind@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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.
Replying to @Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
I doubt the story of the bots disappearing, but Yandex a) has specifically given control to Russian government, by providing a super-share that doesn’t pay dividends but gives the deciding vote, to Sberbank (this kind of share shenanigans are possible under Netherlands’ law, where Yandex is incorporated for this very reason); and b) does provide cloud-hosting services the same way as Amazon does. Yandex is generally considered to basically be a government corporation by now, it’s one of like three candidates whenever the government decides to introduce some ‘sovereign’ service like Russian analogue of YouTube.
Arkady Volozh, the surviving cofounder of Yandex, has left Russia over disagreements about the war and the government’s control, taking for himself some side business that Yandex was doing abroad, either drones or self-driving cars or something like that. And relocated some 1000 Yandex employees that decided to leave with him.