Blowing up data centers will not stop troll farms. Troll traffic is not coming from Yandex.
Some of the claims appear to conflate data centers with Russian “troll farms” such as the Internet Research Agency (IRA), which became well-known following a 2015 expose. The IRA operated out of a St. Petersburg office building, not a datacenter operated by Yandex. Nor does there appear to be any particular reason the IRA would require an inordinate amount of network resources.
That’s one instance of a troll farm from 11 years ago.
Surely nowadays these troll farms are LLM powered instead of human powered and of course need compute power.
Where the humans sit that orchestrate these bot networks is another topic.
Surely
Trust me bro, it’s the vibe
There’s been a spike recently in australia of people paying Indonesians to post right wing content, half the time a company is using AI they’re actually just paying people in the third world pennies for posting
a lot of this stuff is propaganda on behalf of ai companies, ai is scary! Ai is evil! Ai is powerful! lol
Yeah the idea that they would just route their traffic from a regular office network connection is truly stupid.
They will be using data center compute to generate the traffic, but proxy it through residential proxies and other compromised devices that form a botnet.
Central generation with remote access for the trolls, and distributed outbound traffic.
Surely nowadays these troll farms are LLM powered instead of human powered and of course need compute power.
Where is the lion’s share of LLM compute located?
I don’t know about that.
Feels like there’s a high risk of the LLM going off script and going against the points they are trying to make.
Just like Trump’s AI site saying the 2020 election was not stolen.
Do you not see that daily? There’s nothing internally consistent or coherent about 3/4 of what bots post, it’s just garbage that sounds plausibly human.
I’m not opposed to blowing up data centers in general, just saying…
I assume that includes the ones in which Piefed, Lemmy.world and Gizmodo are hosted?
Those especially
I respectfully disagree, more data centers should be destroyed, the Russian one currently should take priority
Nah you still need datacenter compute for orchestration
deleted by creator
silenced Yandex crawler bots,. indexing for their search engine, not social media bots
I was going to say… Does anyone genuinely believe we’re going to see fewer bots by late October? As though we didn’t have a bumper crop of them run out of American datacenters?
Does anyone seriously believe “the bots are gone, so I shouldn’t accuse anyone on the internet of being a bot anymore”? Or are we going to see the same “Bad Take = Russian NPC” response every time someone with an .ml origin says something that sets a .world local account on tilt?
You tankies don’t need to be called bots, you do that shit all on your own. The fediverse and Lemmy is way to small for russia to give a shit about it. You guys spew tankie shit for free for them.
The fediverse and Lemmy is way to small for russia to give a shit about it.
Thats not true
Naa those aren’t bots though, that’s literally tankies doing that shit.
Look at the little tankie brigade down voting anything that they don’t like when you call them out in a instance they don’t control lol
I’ve seen Russian Propaganda pushed to outlets with single digit reach. It’s like they’re subscribed to Meltwater for niche outlets or something. I wouldn’t put it past them to have a guy or two who exclusively earn their paychecks shitposting here.
Fair enough, I just feel like the tankies here are home grown morons lol
Everyone here is a home grown moron. We’re all just one schizophrenic meth head typing into a word doc.
If you’re a propagandist then there’s value in being active in niche social media networks. It makes you a big fish in a small pond, and if the social network for some reason blows up then you’d be one of the early adopters which will give you more influence. For example Ghislaine Macwell was a moderator on Reddit, but apparently also Voat iirc, which is an obscure Reddit clone that never had a big user base
Why not both?
To be clear four days later there is still zero evidence this is true.
Which gives exactly no evidence of a decline in social media bots.
If you actually click the source link in the article, you see that the graph shows the bot traffic from “AS13238 YANDEX — Yandex LLC”, not the internet overall. That caption was conveniently cropped. Also, those bots are very likely not the kind that post on twitter but web crawlers. Yandex is a search engine. Of course destroying its data centers stops the web crawlers running in those data centers from indexing sites.
I have yet to see an actual statistic of the amount political social media posts or active users on social media sites changing in any way.
Edit: claiming that this attack has destroyed the bot farms and giving mislabeled graphs as sources is actively harmful because it leads people to believe that everything that is left must be “real people” when it’s very likely that pretty much all of the bots are still active.
It doesn’t matter. People have already made up their minds, facts are irrelevant.
Yandex also offers Cloud Services. Just saying…
Okay, good. Now show me the statistics that show that there are actually fewer bots than last week.
Don’t get me wrong, I desperately want these news to be true. But so far every single article I’ve seen links back (directly or indirectly) to that one CloudFlare chart that doesn’t say what people think it says. Some point to a few individual posts that didn’t get many interactions. But as far as I’m aware nobody has made the effort to check if there is an actual widespread difference and which topics it affects. Right now this all seems like confirmation bias and wishful thinking. And again, I get it. We need good news now more than ever. But the only thing worse than no good news is good news that just isn’t true and leads to us letting our guard down.
Oh, i’m with you, don’t worry. Just wanted to note that. Yandex has several datacenters, so for a really noticeable drop they’d need to wipe several of them. Though, they might have some more spread around the world…
That’s why asked, because the cited source doesn’t make the same claims.
Tomshardware doesn’t show twitter account changes it talks about cloudflare traffic and expert opinions but thelondoneconimoc has a better article on the effects on e.g. Reform’s twitter.
Edit:
Here’s a quote from my above source
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.
{…}
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.
Hmmm, it seems more strikes are needed.
Libs gonna lib, hey?
Cherry picking individuals with low engagement is not a serious analysis.
People downvoting this inconvenient truth the same ones who accuse others of being propagandists.
As though somone blaming Ukraine for “refusing to negotiate peace” has any room to speak on “inconvenient truths”.
Well, on the other hand, users from .ml should be regarded as experts on avoiding inconvenient truths - their entire ideology is based off historical revisionism and “critical thinking” analysis of geopolitics.
Lmao, Stalin defeated the Nazis and beat the Americans to space.
Also beat the Americans at being found dead soaked in his piss
RIP
An .ml defending Russia …
Seems like they didn’t blow up the correct data center to silence you.
Everyone here is a russian bot execpt for you, Привет от Сталина.
Sorry, your bot is in another data center.
How is that, in any way, defending Russia?
From how it was explained to me by colleagues that work with this stuff for us is that those data centers were links in a chain of vpns that many bot swarms used and when they went down their ip addresses were reveled and on many platforms that resulted in automated bans and THAT is the subjective experience of the bots being silenced
There is also zero evidence for this
That’s not how any of that should normally work. And I doubt it that your colleagues have insight into Russian operations unless you’re either in the NSA or in the FSB.
This garbage analysis got deleted for a reason.
Some.
Keep it up, dude.
0 comments… Checks out
Based on when you posted this, there were comments 3 hours prior?
It said 0 comments when I commented. I thought it wouldn’t need explaining.
They’re probably a self censored tankiephobe
I don’t know what that is. I could look it up but I won’t. It sounds like such a stupid term, *cringe
Removed by mod
Yup. Too stupid
Sorry to hear it :(
Based Zelenskyy!
I know that he won’t win a peace prize, But this man needs some recognition for unmasking the Putin regimes’ Paper Tiger status. He’s out there making life just a little better for the rest of civilized society, and has really raised Ukraines’ international profile. There’s no way that Ukraine is not coming out of this as a real power player on the European stage, NATO admittance or not.
But yeah, drop in the bucket. At least some of these shitty AI bots are gone for awhile. A reprieve is a reprieve.
Distrust what you’re fed by TV and the press, and to think for yourself rather than accepting any official narratives these days.
I have a (former?) friend who says that. He’s fully addicted to algorithm-induced rage. He sends me 3 or 4 Islamophobic and/or Zionist videos from Instagram or X or Facebook every day for some reason.
That’s not what I meant 😂
They even noticed a decrease in Trump support activity on social media.
And Musk.
hopefully it took out half (or some?) of the bots on TF2
This.
If malicious bot traffic came-out of Yandex’s data centers, its legitimated traffic would be blocked everywhere and yandex wouldn’t have been able to operate such a successful business. There are hundred’s of services that track illegitimate and dangerous bot traffic, such databases are use to block malicious crawlers, bot nets, spam bots, email spams, phishing websites, websites distributing viruses … Yandex can’t afford to allow such activities from its networks.
Just because Ukraine is the victim it doesn’t mean we should spread fake news propaganda. They failed to produce any tangible evidence, and after many sources started debunking the claims and proving the base material to be AI generated. they brought in Zelensky to give it more credibility. it is disheartening to see such fake news rise at the forefront of social media sites. and be upvoted by the masses that on other occasions were championing the fight against fake news. But as long as it fits their narratives, it is good to pass.
If even the US’ Cold War anti-communist propaganda station ‘Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’ states the drop is likely due to Yandex’s crawlers, what does that tell you about the credibility of Zelenskyy (having an obvious conflict of interest) and all Western outlets running with it, by extension? The Russian government might not even need bot farms at this stage, because the West keeps undermining their own credibility: with single-sided, unsubstantiated malinformation of half-truths at best. It’s so obvious to me they’re trying to pass off any critical thinker as being a Russian troll, and trying to escalate the proxy-war by attributing “hybrid-war” sabotages to the “aggressor” (that is conveniently in a weakened state because of it). Yes, Russia undeniably invaded Ukraine, but wouldn’t the US do the same to Mexico if it turned communist, following all of South-America?
Typical .ml user.
It’s so obvious to me they’re trying to pass off any critical thinker as being a Russian troll, and trying to escalate the proxy-war by attributing “hybrid-war” sabotages to the “aggressor”
Weak attempt at obfuscation. Nobody thinks “critical thinkers” are russian trolls; quite the opposite.
And your argument? You’re only disregarding me for using an instance with a reasonable policy, and for what you consider Russian bot traffic, which is exactly the point I’m trying to make; whether or not you consider that of a critical thinker.
My argument? Here it is: https://sopuli.xyz/post/53077260
Plus, everyone notices that whenever a post is about Ukraine, a flock of .ml’s always shows up to pedal kremlin disinfo talking points.
If that’s not you, move along, but if you’re going to defend that behavior by acting like it doesn’t happen, then that identifies your motive here pretty clearly.
I’m not really arguing Russia isn’t facilitating bot-traffic (nor here on Lemmy, regardless of instance), but I simply don’t agree with the framing of most articles on it. The claims are barely substantiated, or conflated with Cloudflare’s general traffic drop (including that of crawlers). Well that, and somewhat of a collation of not immediately related frustrations I have on the overall subject at the end… :)
Removed by mod
Ugh. Pathetic.
And your argument as to why?
reads part of comment
looks at user
oh…it’s an ml account.
@wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz already made that “argument”, if you can call it that. How about meaningfully interacting, instead of disregarding based on something irrelevant?
I could do that, but what would I gain from such a frivolous expenditure of effort?
You’ve already spent time writing two comments. Could’ve also spent that writing something with at least some substance to it. If I’m supposed to value you your time and effort, how about you value mine too?
I’m under no obligation to respect the time and effort of someone who clearly doesn’t value their own.
Same goes for you it seems, since you wrote yet another comment…
Привет от Сталина
