Extremely lazy copy paste:

Did “Russian bot traffic” really disappear after Ukrainian strikes on Yandex servers?

Despite multiple Ukrainian strikes hitting Yandex servers in Russia, a thread by antibot4navalny, which has long tracked state-sponsored social media campaigns and troll farms, explains that the Cloudflare “Bot Traffic” chart many people have cited is really about automated web crawlers operated by Yandex accessing the web.

It’s not connected to “bots” posting on social media, and Russian bot/crawler traffic overallcontinues to be about the same as normal. Still, are you noticing any difference in the posts and comments you’ve seen online?

Thanks. OPs should do that anyhow.

It stands to reason that attacking a few servers won’t stop all of Russia’s hybrid warfare, but it also stands to reason that there is some effect.

In any case, I hope Ukraine continues to succesfully attack (hopefully without civilian casualties) Russian infrastructure. We all benefit from that.

(Dead link) https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/lemmy.ml shows no change.

This domain is for sale

???

Okay that’s strange um I guess you can use others:

https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fediparty/wiki/instance-monitoring-sites

fediDB still works

OK thanks um I guess

edit: pixelfed.social - for photo sharing only - is the 2nd largest in most metrics.

Sorry https://fedidb.com/servers/lemmy.ml is the url for monitoring lemmy.ml the statistics do look like there’s a tiny slump but nothing significant to warrant accusing Yandex bot usage.

It made Fedi news https://cake.kobel.fyi/c/fediverse@lemmy.world/p/225784/fediverse-observer-is-offline-and-no-longer-being-developed

If the goal is to gut down on fake posts, it’d be a lot more helpful if Ukraine were to drone a few troll farms. It might alos have a positive effect on the US November elections.

‘Meddling with the US elections, eh?’ An imaginable question of the (bought and promoted by Russia) US president to Ukraine.

I really like the irony of it. If Ukraine wants to affect the elections in their favour, they should target the bot farms indeed.

Unfortunately the Russian plan has already convinced a majority of republicans of their talking points. So now a decent proportion of the “bots” are human parrots who now largely believe their own bullshit. Or at least believe they need to troll to win for their side. Taking out the bots is nice, but a decade too late.

They really should.

But there are a lot of trollfarms now. And the US is running the majority of the ones that operate in the US you can be sure. With these chatbots, it’s about to make the internet much more dead than it is already.

You don’t think they already have this?

Why do you think this story blew up so much, being largely misinformation?

Why would we assume a troll farm is even a physical thing you can bomb? I imagine 99% of those are work-from-home jobs that people just log into.

The locations of the ‘troll factory’ offices in SPb, formerly owned by Evgeny Prigozhin, are well-known. Although this particular operation seems to have been shut down following Prigozhin’s shenanigans.

No. There has been no effect. I’m sorry your propaganda was fake. Welcome to the internet.

www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9y7l0pm8jkko

Certain reddit communities gotta be a ghost town now

1 person is now responsible for all posts on r/conservative, he’s also the mod and he can’t keep up, sweating in his Dacha waiting for the GRU to turn up and motivate him.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge’s_law_of_headlines

In the field of particle physics, the concept is known as Hinchliffe’s rule, after physicist Ian Hinchliffe, who stated that if a research paper’s title is in the form of a yes–no question, the answer to that question will be “no”. The adage led into a humorous attempt at a liar paradox in a 1988 paper, written by physicist Boris Kayser under the pseudonym “Boris Peon”, which bore the title: “Is Hinchliffe’s Rule True?”, which was followed up in 2015 by a more rigorous article by computer scientist Stuart Shieber titled “Is This Article Consistent with Hinchliffe’s Rule?”.

Brilliant.

No one will learn anything from this.

And it makes perfect sense that before reading this many people felt that they clearly see Russian bots vanishing.

Human psychology is just not equipped for open Web. Especially social media kind of it. F2F and personal webpages and circles of friends are fine, but anything crowd-related is worse than sending pigeons.

But the unsourced graph said it did!

This is a much better article: https://piefed.nl/post/213693

You know, I don’t believe there are so many Russian bots astroturfing the Internet. There are plenty of regular humans who truly believe Russia is doing nothing but defend itself, in “aggressive NATO expansion”, and a whole generally anti-West attitude.

They hate America for being an imperialist power, which… Yeah. Absolutely. But then in the same breath state Russia isn’t, and that they’re nothing more than a victim of said Imperialism.

Consider this an anecdote, but I have family who says these things. Bots need not apply.

Honestly Russia might not need to bot anymore, but with a few bribed content creators and some incendiary alternative takes and a lot of bot accounts you can do a lot of damage.

The point isn’t to astroturf the internet, it’s to guide it in the right direction for people to harbor conspiratorial bullshit like that. It’s like pushing a ball down a slope lightly, the gravity at some point adds way more force than you could have.

They aren’t meant to be the star of the show. Their purpose is to be in the crowd and agitate. They’re the devil that whispers people’s ear.

Bots would have proven to the a failure if a botnet went down and culture wars vanished. Their intention is to manipulate people. Not to wholesale substitute to the population.

Besides the name itself seems to go over heads. Bot farms don’t operate out of a centralized server. They’re not even bots literally. These operations are farmed out to locations around the world. Sometimes they’re real human trolls.

But there don’t need to be trolls, or people deliberately put there by Russia to spread propaganda. There are plenty of people that already do this out of their own accord. Mostly the kind that also believe in other dumb things.

This was one of the biggest misinformation/propaganda campaigns I’ve ever seen.

I won’t blame Zelenskyy for the claims, he’s at war and propaganda is a powerful tool. But the rest of the world just casually pilling on without verifying anything? (Including many well known and trusted news networks and big names). Absolutely unacceptable.

Anyone who works in internet infrastructure should have been shutting this theory down from the start, but because the misinformation is “good”, everyone’s fine with it somehow.

This event really made me lose faith in the world’s news organizations.

Hell, right below this post is another one talking about all the Russian bots who have disappeared and all the comments are “confirming” it.

Why does it feel like your a bot shilling more misinformation

I highly doubt there’s many bots on Lemmy.

I happen to work in IT infrastructure, so I knew this was bullshit from the start. Just need to apply the tiniest bit of critical thinking.

Like what thinking

Point 1:

If I am Russia, and I want to manipulate online opinions, do I do that with a massive bot network from inside my own country?

Maybe, but more likely I want the traffic to look organic, so I want to have it come from all over the world including from inside the US itself. Knocking down a data centre would have no impact on me then.

Additionally, I try many approaches simultaneously, hiring actual people to run these accounts and spread my propaganda online too. As a state actor, cost is not really a concern.

Point 2:

If there actually was a reduction in the kind of traffic being discussed, there would be evidence elsewhere, like these right wing communities that people claim have less posts in them now. But that’s just not the case, the measurements that have been taken indicate traffic and engagement remains similar to a week ago.

You could make it look organic by starting some VPN countries all over the world and feeding your bots via those.

Also your point one has a huge flaw in my opinion - if I were Russia my top priority is to stay hidden and secret, everything you say opposes that, each time you introduce a new human element that is not loyal with certainty (forced or willing) is a weak point, even more so paying hosting companies in other countries that aren’t under direct control. I wouldn’t upload a bot that I wanted to stay in control of to another hosting company without some real knowledge that the bot (and that my control of or connection to) couldn’t be traced back to me in some way.

Also, the article shows examples of engagement reduction on certain Twitter accounts, no idea if that is cherry picked or just a coincidence.

I don’t have Twitter and I have no idea if there is some kind of database of recent engagement metrics, or if I did find one - if it is trustworthy.

How are you determining right wing communities are not having any change in engagement (genuinely curious since I have no idea how you know this).

Okay, so if you’re running VPNs everywhere, guess what? Those are just servers, so you may as well just run the bots directly there because the traffic looks the same either way.

And you seem to be saying that the best way for Russia to hide its activity is to have all the activity originate in Russia where its vulnerable to attacks like this?

Remember, this is a state actor. They have access to more ressources than even the largest companies in the world. There are certainly teams and likely organizations dedicated to spreading propaganda on social media. It would be very naive to assume that’s not happening, and that it’s just Russia doing it.

It would be naive to think private corporations don’t hire shadow PR companies to generate social traffic.

It’s not just the state actors. Private entities are in on the game too.

I want the traffic to look organic, so I want to have it come from all over the world including from inside the US itself.

The reason to use Russian datacenters for bot army is that they are relatively cheap, and they have Russian IP. It appears like a foreign influence campaign if they are caught as bots. CIA bots probably run through Russia, ffs. There’s no connection to Russian government other than allowing bots to an establishment supporter. It’s not as though any US/western government has wanted to cooperate with Russia on any matter of concern.

Just need to apply the tiniest bit of critical thinking.

Sir this is the Internet

What’s the necessary critical details?

It’s one thing if the claims are unevidenced. But you’re going further and claiming it’s outright false. What exactly establishes this story as false?

Why does it feel like you didn’t absorb any of the information they provided?

I find it funny how so many lemmy libs are eager to swallow the propaganda as long as it’s good news for them, lmao.

www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9y7l0pm8jkko

What are some of the red flags you see in the claims?

I find it funny that these articles were posted in the SHITPOSTING communities and people took them seriously, which is honestly pretty common behavior in the… S-H-I-T P-O-S-T-I-N-G communities. I don’t go to aneurysmposting to complain that the posts are hard to understand…

Yeah it was web crawlers, but a person can dream.

seems that was enough to stop thier traffic, most of it. if ukraine can hit more of those, he can suppress it for a while at least. the right wingers of usa, uk, are freaking out over the lack of boost from the propaganda.

Unfortunatley latestagecapitalism and it’s two prominent russian trolls are still going strong. u/saltyamerican and u/godlesscommie. Too bad.

A .world user bitching about anti-capitalists. Wow. Real shocker.

If you’re not feeling a community, just block it. You can always undo it later.

I have the impression that there was some impact, but that it was less general and much shorter than when the Russian ira was temporarily shut down around the 2018 midterms. Maybe the effect was bigger + longer on sites with more account security like Facebook, but i don’t use any, so I wouldn’t know.

2018 was, when significant reddit bans were happening, russia was finally getting thier bots into social media at this point

Reddit attempting to ban bots makes little difference. This is what I was referring to: nbcnews.com/…/trump-approved-operation-disabled-r…

hum… now LemmyGrad.ml ?
fedidb.com/servers/lemmygrad.ml
is it down for other users as it is for me ?

I don’t know but when I clicked the link you posted I get a server not found error.

Enjoy while it lasts. They will spin up again on new regions. Take out all Yandex data centers, they’ll move to Alibaba cloud.

all the tankies here and on reddit saying it hasnt affected the bots at all, and there is no change in thier bot traffic.