cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/11858823
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Over the weekend, Ukraine carried out a co-ordinated drone strike against several major Russian data centres. This completely decimated Russia’s Yandex, … which controls more than 70% of search traffic in the country, and has reportedly resulted in a dramatic fall in bot traffic from the Yandex network.
As per the bot analysts at Tom’s Hardware, bot traffic from the Yandex network has dropped to just 0.4% of the maximum number of HTTP requests recorded in the past two weeks. That means activity from automated, Russian-hosted accounts has been virtually eliminated on social media.
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As a result, the social media engagement on posts from [far-right] Reform UK figures appears to have dropped in the wake of Ukrainian strikes on Russian data centres.
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There has already been a strong and significant impact on bot traffic in countries such as France and Germany.
David Colon, a French information operations researcher, has noted a huge difference in the performance of narratives generated by the Russia-linked information operations group, Storm-1516.
The silencing of the bots also appears to have caused a dramatic drop in activity around Germany’s far-right AfD…
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Amongst others, the article is citing Britain’s Reform politician Richard Tice. Three posts on X from the Reform deputy leader to his almost 400,000 followers on Monday, 11 October [hadn’t] hit triple figures for reposts or comments, with one not even reaching 10,000 views … Before the Ukrainian strikes on the Russia data centres, Tice’s posts got considerably more engagement, consistently hitting triple figures for comments and reposts, whilst racking up hundreds of thousands of views.
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A similar pattern can be seen when it comes to other far-right figures such as Nigel Farage [the linked article is given evidence about that].
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As Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky himself said after the strikes on Russian data centres, it’s suddenly become a “little easier to breathe” on social media.
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The BBC has debunked the claims in this article.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9y7l0pm8jkko
Misinformation can come from anywhere.
Not only that, but JK Rowling’s supporters mysteriously vanished
let’s now bomb the indian, chinese, american, israeli or any other bot farms and data centers and live in an utopia.
From the article:
As per the bot analysts at Tom’s Hardware, bot traffic from the Yandex network has dropped to just 0.4% of the maximum number of HTTP requests recorded in the past two weeks. That means activity from automated, Russian-hosted accounts has been virtually eliminated on social media.
That… is not what that means. The HTTP requests graphed by Cloudflare shown in the Tom’s Hardware article are the yandex web crawler. This is traffic from YandexBot, which is their search engine’s equivalent to GoogleBot. That drop in traffic doesn’t indicate anything whatsoever about russian-hosted accounts on social media, it’s about a search engine’s bots reading web pages. 🤦
Note that the TomsHardware article graph comes from here: https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots/as13238 - this is one of Yandex’s AS numbers. In case you doubt that the traffic cloudlfare calls “bot traffic” there is really just the YandexBot, and you really want to believe that maybe Cloudflare is classifying social-media-posting HTTP requests as “bots” in that graph, you can check their graph for YandexBot specifically here https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots/directory/yandex and you’ll see:
Besides grossly mischaracterizing what the Tom’s Hardware article says by implying that the YandexBot web crawler has something to do with the kind of bots they’re talking about, this The London Economic article also cites some slightly more plausible sounding evidence for reduced social media activity:
Take Richard Tice for example. Below are three posts on X from the Reform deputy leader to his almost 400,000 followers on Monday, 11 October. At the time of writing, none of the posts had hit triple figures for reposts or comments, with one not even reaching 10,000 views.
Could British fascists be getting retweets from bot farms in a yandex datacenter? Sure, they’re a cloud provider, they’re no doubt hosting some stuff like that.
But, does this example actually demonstrate it? No. The first yandex datacenter strike was on October 8; here is a tweet from @TiceRichard from October 6 with only 10 replies and 6 retweets:
If there has actually been a measurable drop in “inauthentic” social media posts (or other retweets or likes or whatever) as a result of the yandex datacenter strikes, I still haven’t seen evidence of it.
Another lm account playing down the reality.
Besides grossly mischaracterizing what the article says by picking one incident and reframing it.
The http requests are even one piece of information in in this article. There is much more than this, and the entire investigation provides strong evidence that the European far-right’s media engagement dropped significantly due to the elimination of Russian bots.
The same appears to be true here on Lemmy as many users in other threads have also said. It shows once again that tankie and the far-right are more similar than they would admit?
Then show us this strong evidence, preferably in the same quality as the previous post. But all your evidence is always “some guy I know said it” while other people are actually trying to investigate the graphs. Even many other media outlets already debunked it as misleading, like the BBC and also the German fact-finder. But those are also all Tankies, right? It doesn’t matter that some people might be against Russia but still do care for the truthful statements. Everyone who isn’t completely blinded by ideology is just a Tankie.
The previous post is an ml propaganda account.
Where did the recent drop in social media engagement of European far-right party members come from? I posted an article yesterday with examples for that, and everyone can go these accounts looking it up.
The previous post is an ml propaganda account.
Yes, I looked into the persons account. A 5 year old account which is repeatedly looking for better evidence regarding this topic while asserting that this given data does not meet the proper quality standards. Also strongly investigated in open source products and a stand against AI code. As I just said: Everyone who isn’t exactly following your rhetoric is a Tankie and a propaganda account.
tbh I believe you are a Tankie. By undermining western discourse culture you are a false flag operation payed by Putin to discredit European ideals. Makes sense, right?
I’ve seen a lot of reports of a severe drop in right wing engagement. How do you account for that?
I’m seeing a lot of people saying things but no evidence.
This should be national news in every country it affected significantly. What more proof is needed that democracies are under siege and it’s working to manipulate elections? Countries should invest massively in preventing this kind of propaganda and defending their democracies.
But But all the tankies are saying it was just web crawler bots. Surely finely honed suckers who shill for putin for free wouldn’t lie.
/s
Did .ml traffic drop?
i’ve been searching that but cannot find a reliable source. Those fails you can read in my comments.
We have been talking about the drop on twatter and reddit. The tankies have chimed in that it was only web crawlers. If you are not a tankie who really cares about ml traffic?
I got proudly banned from the usa community on .ml … Fuck those guys
Not only in Europe, when you look at the tweets of the White House from today, you basically don’t see any MAGA replies under them and almost exclusively criticism which is genuinely insane compared to the situation a week ago.
I’d love to see some screenshots.
Here’s one (was too large to upload it to Lemmy). I could keep scrolling, but you probably get the picture.
Sorry I don’t go on twitter please explain it like I just landed on this planet. Don’t get me wrong I’ve been sharing the OP’s link where I can.
The whole Yandex is just a search engine crawler is such tanky bs (they do hosting too).
Telling, isn’t it?
Fantastic timing for the US midterms, and a great move!
Maybe that was what the disagreement between Zelensky and the Orange-in-Chief was really about? How was again the slogan, “Data is the new Oil”, wasn’t it?
😂
Yall have the most impressive ability to see what you want to see.
I agree that this observation is anecdotal.
So. Just so the internet gets usable again, we need a gofundme-campaign for ongoing long range strikes on data centers.
we need a gofundme-campaign for ongoing long range strikes on data centers.
Ask and you shall receive the official Ukrainian defensive war donation site
Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, there are still a lot of fucked up actual people around
The internet will never be “pure” or a utopian wonderland, but taking out significant sources of bot traffic definitely make it better.
Yea. But my ethics dictate not to use cruise missiles or drones on them, so I prefer hardware losses 🤷♂️
Same here, but I just don’t think this was enough to make the internet as a whole usable again.
You can actually keep up with the misinformation, though, when it isn’t amplified a thousand times.
Your ethics are cowardly and shitty. Only one thing ever stopped Nazis.
See, instead of outing yourself as moron, you could have asked: I’m pro defensive actions, especially on Ukrainians ground. I’m pro long strike missiles on strategic targets. I’m against indifferent targeting of civilian life like the Russians do it.
So… anything to add?
But they won’t get a feedback loop from bots that make them more visible and more fucked up.
This is just
one facilitythree facilities. I’m sure there are loads of them scattered worldwide trying to destabilise western democracies.Sure, but one less is still less of them.
Absolutely. The more the better
Sí, Señor.
It would be trivial to just set up the operation on AWS or Microsoft servers in the US. I guess the reason the have not done it is that the US would have full insight in the software, users and social media accounts they’re using, which might be an issue if the government changes.
And so the good people of Ukraine continue to not only defend themselves, but a lot more people around the world.
Huzzah!But tankies told me that Russia is a peaceful democratic country, and that Russia has no will whatsoever to act aggressively towards its neighbours, even on the internet.
In fact, tankies told me that westerners are the only people in the world who are ever aggressive, malicious, or evil.
Them “evil tankies” that “support” Russia only ever do so to take the (in their mind) lesser evil stance compared to what they see as complete western dominance in the region, were Russia to lose. Not that I agree with that, but it’s funny how nuance and lesser evilism only exist to you guys when it comes to absolve yourselves for voting for pedophile war criminals painted blue in America
ok so why I vote for the lesser social democrat they all seem to want to kill me
Who told you that? Like specifically?
That reads pretty confrontational
Don’t know who you talked to. You can believe in communism AND say that Russia is a hostile pos of a state and that Putin is a war criminal and should be judge as so.
They said tankies, not communists
Yeah. Simping for authoritarian regimes, while larping leftists, has absolutely nothing to do with communism.
What does Putin have to do with communism? Except hating it.
Don’t know who you talked to. You can believe in communism AND say that Russia is a hostile pos of a state and that Putin is a war criminal and should be judge as so.
Yes, but not on any community on lemmy.ml…
You’ve apperently not talked to a lot of .lm users then.
Not a single “Tankie” told you this. You’re just a liar.
It’s certainly the general gist of what tankies say.
Right, misrepresenting and exaggerating your “enemy” is just fine and normal behavior. Democracy totally works that way.
A master stroke by those who oppose concentration of power in a minority of wannabe fascists and dictators. This exposes how the wannabe fascists and dictators are trying to use fossil fuel revenue to simulate and impersonate a large population of electors, with artificial bots (or is it “super bots” now? 🤣)
I wonder if that will make any difference in Brazil’s runoff round of elections…, hopefully they can stay offline until the 25th, (or even Nov 3 would be nice)?
I bet the new Russian Bots are hosted in the US
they probably using residential ips as proxies from the USA, where the command and control server is barely matters
What do you think the data center under the east wing is going to be for?
The people will still happily vote for them though, because we’re among morons.
Hum… now LemmyGrad.ml ?
https://fedidb.com/servers/lemmygrad.ml
… is it down for other users as it is down for me ?You are absolutely right of course : this is the main story. Only, i was trying to also include some possible effects of the strikes to our own fediverse social media.
🤷
do you think lemmygrad.ml is hosted on on yandex??? huge if true!
No. But i wonder if a measurable effect of the strikes will be visible anywhere on the fediverse and for which accounts if so.
Edit : i can’t see anything on :
https://fedilist.com/
either…i wonder if a measurable effect of the strikes will be visible anywhere on the fediverse and for which accounts if so
ok, i see where you stand. i like the answer you were given to that comment you linked.
This seems to be a developing story … maybe we will know more in a few days.
icymi i edited my comment there to add a link to my other comment (in this thread) discussing the article the person replying to me links (which is the same article this thread links to).
(i can’t reply to them because their comment doesn’t exist on my instance, because they were banned long ago; i see in the modlog that they’re banned from other instances also for vote manipulation)
This seems to be a developing story … maybe we will know more in a few days.
if you do find the evidence for this story which i’ve been looking for and not finding, please, let me know here!
Thanks, in the coming days, if i find anything, i will come back here.
Edit : i can’t see anything on : https://fedilist.com/ either…
huh? https://fedilist.com/instance/lemmygrad.ml says the last downtime was 39.5 days ago.
this site is frozen for me, again.
i was searching for a site that says if there is a change in traffic at a given instance, i failed in this search.
No?
