posted in Technology
Drone strikes didn’t take out a Russian bot farm, but we were primed to believe it
www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/10/ukraine-drone-strike-yandex-russian-bot-farm-right-wing-maga-afd-reform-uk-conspiracy-theory-viral-rumor/
tl;dr the “bots” were web crawlers, not social media accounts. And there’s no evidence that disinformation campaigns saw any change at all.
Replying to @artyom@piefed.social
And notably, most of the actual news articles, even from the start, admitted that there wasn’t any proof if you actually read the articles. They were all “People are saying there’s a drop!” but farther down it was all “There’s no evidence it’s happening, but people are saying!!!”
Replying to @daychilde@lemmy.world
One European Parliament MP said something, everyone else just went with it, Zelensky then doubled down and apparently that was good enough. It soured me on some publications for sure.