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]
Point 1:
If I am Russia, and I want to manipulate online opinions, do I do that with a massive bot network from inside my own country?
Maybe, but more likely I want the traffic to look organic, so I want to have it come from all over the world including from inside the US itself. Knocking down a data centre would have no impact on me then.
Additionally, I try many approaches simultaneously, hiring actual people to run these accounts and spread my propaganda online too. As a state actor, cost is not really a concern.
Point 2:
If there actually was a reduction in the kind of traffic being discussed, there would be evidence elsewhere, like these right wing communities that people claim have less posts in them now. But that’s just not the case, the measurements that have been taken indicate traffic and engagement remains similar to a week ago.
The reason to use Russian datacenters for bot army is that they are relatively cheap, and they have Russian IP. It appears like a foreign influence campaign if they are caught as bots. CIA bots probably run through Russia, ffs. There’s no connection to Russian government other than allowing bots to an establishment supporter. It’s not as though any US/western government has wanted to cooperate with Russia on any matter of concern.
You could make it look organic by starting some VPN countries all over the world and feeding your bots via those.
Also your point one has a huge flaw in my opinion - if I were Russia my top priority is to stay hidden and secret, everything you say opposes that, each time you introduce a new human element that is not loyal with certainty (forced or willing) is a weak point, even more so paying hosting companies in other countries that aren’t under direct control. I wouldn’t upload a bot that I wanted to stay in control of to another hosting company without some real knowledge that the bot (and that my control of or connection to) couldn’t be traced back to me in some way.
Also, the article shows examples of engagement reduction on certain Twitter accounts, no idea if that is cherry picked or just a coincidence.
I don’t have Twitter and I have no idea if there is some kind of database of recent engagement metrics, or if I did find one - if it is trustworthy.
How are you determining right wing communities are not having any change in engagement (genuinely curious since I have no idea how you know this).
Okay, so if you’re running VPNs everywhere, guess what? Those are just servers, so you may as well just run the bots directly there because the traffic looks the same either way.
And you seem to be saying that the best way for Russia to hide its activity is to have all the activity originate in Russia where its vulnerable to attacks like this?
Remember, this is a state actor. They have access to more ressources than even the largest companies in the world. There are certainly teams and likely organizations dedicated to spreading propaganda on social media. It would be very naive to assume that’s not happening, and that it’s just Russia doing it.
It would be naive to think private corporations don’t hire shadow PR companies to generate social traffic.
It’s not just the state actors. Private entities are in on the game too.