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!!!”

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.

We were shown a graph and given a story, you’ve internalized it and spread it to others. I don’t that narrative because the evidence doesn’t play it out.

I haven’t done anything except explain the words in the article.

futurism.com/…/elon-musk-engagement-shrivels-dest…

That’s not evidence, that’s just another article

And then Musk cut Ukraine off from Starlink

I did not spread it, I did not just believe stuff I still don’t see a clear picture of what was effected and if or if not online campaigns of the Russian state were in any way effected or not. They key for answering that would be in depth investigation of engagement and traffic on various autocratic right accounts in the EU, of AfD and Co. We know the timeline after all. Indirect effects are possible of course as well. Existing psyop campaigns can be theoretically also effected by knock on effects due to disruptions in the core online services of the country.

Very possible. They rely on good translations for example, and I would assume Yandex was one of the services that offered this. Or at least it might have run in the same data centers.

Without trustworthy translations, you can hardly influence as easily.

And even if there are alternatives, the existing data pipelines need to be reworked first (new APIs, no contracts, etc)

No, there is no evidence and the graphs were just Yandex search crawlers. Yet there are numerous anecdotes about far right accounts getting substantially less amplification and engagement in the aftermath. That could be just a mirage but it could be more than that. That would warrant a proper statistical investigation at some point. After all, the question if Yandex servers host parts of the Russian psyop system is a valid one, that won’t be clarified by either misleading graphs, anecdotal stories or stories about how it was absolutely nothing, without offering any evidence for that either. Those big data centres were, from what I have read hardly just doing web crawler stuff.

Yeah I mean just because there’s no evidence doesn’t mean it’s not true, of course. But also there are potentially psychological explanations for this.

Why did Musk cut Ukraine off from star link over web crawlers?

Did he? Seems unlikely.

I think he cut them off because Donny wanted it over Ukraine not wanting to be in on his super cool “deal”.

Timing is sus