dfyx

1. Because people still misread a single CloudFlare graph that shows a huge drop in bot traffic. The thing is, that graph only shows traffic between one specific subnet and CloudFlare. If you bomb a data center, of course that data center’s traffic drops. But for the internet overall, that’s less than 0.1% of the total bot traffic and social media bots don’t target CloudFlare. They target Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. There is no reason they would ever even show up in CloudFlare’s statistics.
2. Barely anyone seems to actually measure the amount of bot activity on social networks. They see less traffic so that must mean fewer bot-written posts.
3. Even the one linked here is misleading. Seems like they did analyze message contents but a very small amount (less than 5000 per day) and their “84% drop” happened for 1.5 days then immediately recovered.
4. For those who profit from the bots, it’s a great narrative. Now they can claim that everything positive about them that you see on social media must be true because after all, the evil bots are dead and only true Americans write stuff about Trump, a couple of weeks before the midterms. Or about the German AfD fighting against being banned.
5. Cognitive biases. Many of us (including me) desperately want this to be true so we are more likely to critically examine the details. I don’t think Jowi Morales who wrote the Tom’s Hardware article that many other articles quote wanted to mislead anyone. He saw something that fit his worldview and went with it. It’s the same reason why we’ve seen “the AI bubble is about to collapse any minute now” articles basically every week for over a year and yet it’s still going.

Compression stockings. Do young people even remember that Gentoo exists?

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.

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.

AI Disclosure (as per https://lemmy.world/post/49320548):

Implementation - Generated

Testing - Generated

Design - Generated

So what is your contribution to that whole project? Clearly not the idea because that was Google.