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]
  • Tattorack@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    11 hours ago

    You know, I don’t believe there are so many Russian bots astroturfing the Internet. There are plenty of regular humans who truly believe Russia is doing nothing but defend itself, in “aggressive NATO expansion”, and a whole generally anti-West attitude.

    They hate America for being an imperialist power, which… Yeah. Absolutely. But then in the same breath state Russia isn’t, and that they’re nothing more than a victim of said Imperialism.

    Consider this an anecdote, but I have family who says these things. Bots need not apply.

  • belochka@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    21 hours ago

    And it makes perfect sense that before reading this many people felt that they clearly see Russian bots vanishing.

    Human psychology is just not equipped for open Web. Especially social media kind of it. F2F and personal webpages and circles of friends are fine, but anything crowd-related is worse than sending pigeons.

    • P1nkman@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      12 hours ago

      In the field of particle physics, the concept is known as Hinchliffe’s rule, after physicist Ian Hinchliffe, who stated that if a research paper’s title is in the form of a yes–no question, the answer to that question will be “no”. The adage led into a humorous attempt at a liar paradox in a 1988 paper, written by physicist Boris Kayser under the pseudonym “Boris Peon”, which bore the title: “Is Hinchliffe’s Rule True?”, which was followed up in 2015 by a more rigorous article by computer scientist Stuart Shieber titled “Is This Article Consistent with Hinchliffe’s Rule?”.

      Brilliant.

    • digdig@piefed.socialEnglish
      0·
      21 hours ago

      1 person is now responsible for all posts on r/conservative, he’s also the mod and he can’t keep up, sweating in his Dacha waiting for the GRU to turn up and motivate him.

  • KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    0·
    1 day ago

    Extremely lazy copy paste:

    Did “Russian bot traffic” really disappear after Ukrainian strikes on Yandex servers?

    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 overallcontinues to be about the same as normal. Still, are you noticing any difference in the posts and comments you’ve seen online?

    • A_norny_mousse@piefed.socialEnglish
      0·
      23 hours ago

      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.