Despite multiple Ukrainian strikes hitting Yandex servers in Russia, a thread by antibot4navalny, which has long tracked state-sponsored social media campaigns and troll farms, explains that the Cloudflare “Bot Traffic” chart many people have cited is really about automated web crawlers operated by Yandex accessing the web.
It’s not connected to “bots” posting on social media, and Russian bot/crawler traffic overall continues to be about the same as normal. Still, are you noticing any difference in the posts and comments you’ve seen online?
[Media: https://bsky.app/profile/antibot4navalny.bsky.social/post/3mxmv7t6nxc27]
Extremely lazy copy paste:
Thanks. OPs should do that anyhow.
It stands to reason that attacking a few servers won’t stop all of Russia’s hybrid warfare, but it also stands to reason that there is some effect.
In any case, I hope Ukraine continues to succesfully attack (hopefully without civilian casualties) Russian infrastructure. We all benefit from that.
If the goal is to gut down on fake posts, it’d be a lot more helpful if Ukraine were to drone a few troll farms. It might alos have a positive effect on the US November elections.
They really should.
But there are a lot of trollfarms now. And the US is running the majority of the ones that operate in the US you can be sure. With these chatbots, it’s about to make the internet much more dead than it is already.
You don’t think they already have this?
Why do you think this story blew up so much, being largely misinformation?
‘Meddling with the US elections, eh?’ An imaginable question of the (bought and promoted by Russia) US president to Ukraine.
I really like the irony of it. If Ukraine wants to affect the elections in their favour, they should target the bot farms indeed.
Unfortunately the Russian plan has already convinced a majority of republicans of their talking points. So now a decent proportion of the “bots” are human parrots who now largely believe their own bullshit. Or at least believe they need to troll to win for their side. Taking out the bots is nice, but a decade too late.
Why would we assume a troll farm is even a physical thing you can bomb? I imagine 99% of those are work-from-home jobs that people just log into.
The locations of the ‘troll factory’ offices in SPb, formerly owned by Evgeny Prigozhin, are well-known. Although this particular operation seems to have been shut down following Prigozhin’s shenanigans.
No. There has been no effect. I’m sorry your propaganda was fake. Welcome to the internet.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9y7l0pm8jkko