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
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.
That’s not evidence, that’s just another article
Replying to @NathanRanch@lemmy.zip
And then Musk cut Ukraine off from Starlink
Replying to @NathanRanch@lemmy.zip
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.
Replying to @Jiral@lemmy.world
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)