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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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
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Yea. But my ethics dictate not to use cruise missiles or drones on them, so I prefer hardware losses 🤷♂️
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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?
Psudeoscience and the accompanying drug use.
But they won’t get a feedback loop from bots that make them more visible and more fucked up.
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Sure, but one less is still less of them.
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Those three supposedly are over half of Yandex’s compute capacity. The rest are in striking distance too.
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The internet will never be “pure” or a utopian wonderland, but taking out significant sources of bot traffic definitely make it better.
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.
Sí, Señor.
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.
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?
Telling, isn’t it?
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I agree that this observation is anecdotal.
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).
Top one is Trump’s post. The rest is replies to him. The ads sprinkled in are in German. 1 T in the top right corner of each one means “1 day” which is how old the post/replies are.
Would you normally see a lot of praise on a trump post? Remember I live under a rock if twitter is concerned.
Not a clue. He made his own social media platform a year or so back and I only look at Twitter if it’s some NFL news I can’t find elsewhere.
Then I have no idea what Redditquaza is trying to say with their link
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.
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.
You’re absolutely right. Thanks for correcting me.
What does Putin have to do with communism? Except hating it.
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.
The bbc are tankies?
Who told you that? Like specifically?
That reads pretty confrontational
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Asking like that — a tad bit, yeah
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Oh, thank you, you’re so considerate, a pleasure to meet such a nice person
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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
I guess I see Ukraine as the “lesser evil” by far:
- Russia is invading and trying to dominate its smaller neighbours, while Ukraine isn’t
- The Russian state has seemingly carried out assassinations of people it didn’t like (Alexei Navalny, Alexander Litvinenko, Zelimkhan Khangoshvili) - I think Ukraine has only carried out assassinations of Russian military figures, and only after Russia launched a massive invasion of Ukraine
- Ukraine seems to allow protests which are critical of the government, while Russia hands out severe punishments, including long prison sentences, for activists who disagree with the Russian government
- According to the OSCE (Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe), of which Ukraine and Russia are both members, Ukraine’s 2019 presidential election “was competitive, voters had a broad choice and turned out in high numbers”, although it notes some criticisms of the process, while in Russia, the OSCE wasn’t even invited to the 2024 presidential election, perhaps because Russia knew they’d be rigging the vote
I’ve noticed that tankies like to point out that far-right figures exist in Ukraine. Yes they do. But they exist in Russia too. In fact, some Russian far-right figures have influence over the Russian government. Perhaps that’s why Russia is pursuing an imperialist foreign policy.
Edit: I just want to point out that I’m not saying the Ukrainian people or the Russian people are worse or better than the other side. I’m only talking about their governments. To me the current Ukrainian government seems like the “lesser evil” compared to the current Russian government.
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Yeah that’s fair, you won’t be seeing be defending the Russian government and in fact I agree with most of this. I just wanted to point out common hypocrisy I see in online spaces where a different, zero tolerance standard is applied when it comes to foreign policy
Btw, nonconfrontational was banned for ban evasion. I permabanned their first account for trolling, toxicity and genocide denial and they decided to make another account with exactly the same name report someone they disagreed with probably thinking I wouldnt remember them or something.
The BBC has debunked the claims in this article.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9y7l0pm8jkko
Misinformation can come from anywhere.
Exactly. Hate to say it, but most of the political bot farms are likely not in Russia, but in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh etc. it’s cheap to hire people there, and X has once already debunked that plenty of far right traffic comes from India.
Also debunked independently by German Netzpolitik https://netzpolitik.org/2026/angriffe-auf-yandex-aus-brennenden-rechenzentren-in-russland-wird-kein-bot-ausfall-bei-der-afd/
Misinformation works on 95% of audience who hear what they like to hear. Sources are optional.
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 got proudly banned from the usa community on .ml … Fuck those guys
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 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)?
This is misleading. Those HTTP requests from the Yandex network are mostly Yandex search engine crawlers. There is no reliable link to numbers about social media bots. source
Thank you, nine-month-old .ml account with one comment, for your input – input which refuses to engage with anything in this article in favor of a strawman.
I guess they didn’t hit all the data centres
They must be from a different datacenter. /s
Where can I donate for a missile to hit that particular datacenter?
As posted above by @drcobaltjedi@programming.dev, you can try donating to the official Ukrainian defensive war donation site.
Purely anecdotal, but I also feel like I’ve been seeing far fewer random .ml accounts defending fascist dictators in the past few days. Normally, a thread like this would be overwhelmed with them, and anyone who disagreed would have 5-10 downvotes. Today there’s exactly one, and the people shitting on him are “winning” the votes.
To be fair, this is also not Lemmy.world, or any of the more “mainstream” Lemmy communities.
Well, while the bots are quiet, it is worth mentioning that y’all should ignore the downvotes and say what you want to say. The whole voting bullshit has a chilling effect on speech and it’s clear that ‘they’ know that and like it.
This is why I put “winning” in quotes. It’s meaningless, but it’s useful for specific observations about things like brigading.
is .world better?
100% yes
They got some weirdos, sure. Every group of that size would. But they aren’t mostly weirdo’s that spew Russian propaganda like .ml
Also, is their account 9 month old and only have a single comment? No. You pick one aspect and make it seem like your arguments are the same.
“He’s outta line, but he’s right”
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The http requests are only one point of information, the article links more sources and investigations in addition to that. All point in the same direction.
Oh look, an ml denies Russia are the bad guys. Everyone scratch that off your daily Lemmy bingo card.
Russia are the bad guys. I just think the article is misleading
I know that it’s anecdotal but the drop off in MAGAposting on X and AP articles has been noticeable; very noticeable.
As a matter of fact it is. They test 1200 subreddits for drops on the specific dates. Unsurprisingly it finds subreddits by pure chance that dropped on these days. This is statistics 101 error. That’s why it got deleted.
while I do agree that most mls say that, and that I disagree with their denial as you do too, the post you are replying to does not make any denial of russia being bad in anyway, it simply argues based on real factal data that the datacenters are not responsible for the bots
I bet the new Russian Bots are hosted in the US
What do you think the data center under the east wing is going to be for?
they probably using residential ips as proxies from the USA, where the command and control server is barely matters
I can’t wait to see how different the internet is when Israeli data centres get hit.
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? 🤣)
let’s now bomb the indian, chinese, american, israeli or any other bot farms and data centers and live in an utopia.
You CAN just turn off your Internet access if you want to.
true. i could also kill myself because life is unfair.
I’m a little less concerned about the Russian bots than all the American platforms that have been allowing and tolerating this for decades now.
You motherfuckers rebuilt Europe only to throw it to fascism again 100 years later.
And so the good people of Ukraine continue to not only defend themselves, but a lot more people around the world.
Huzzah!https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrscWBP3lOg
Pretty good report - essentially nope.
Probably, they were debunking the graph. Russia doesn’t keep a public facing graph for how many bots they have online.
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.
