This was one of the biggest misinformation/propaganda campaigns I’ve ever seen.
I won’t blame Zelenskyy for the claims, he’s at war and propaganda is a powerful tool. But the rest of the world just casually pilling on without verifying anything? (Including many well known and trusted news networks and big names). Absolutely unacceptable.
Anyone who works in internet infrastructure should have been shutting this theory down from the start, but because the misinformation is “good”, everyone’s fine with it somehow.
This event really made me lose faith in the world’s news organizations.
Hell, right below this post is another one talking about all the Russian bots who have disappeared and all the comments are “confirming” it.
Why does it feel like your a bot shilling more misinformation
I highly doubt there’s many bots on Lemmy.
I happen to work in IT infrastructure, so I knew this was bullshit from the start. Just need to apply the tiniest bit of critical thinking.
Just need to apply the tiniest bit of critical thinking.
Sir this is the Internet
Like what thinking
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.
Yeah it was web crawlers, but a person can dream.
I find it funny that these articles were posted in the SHITPOSTING communities and people took them seriously, which is honestly pretty common behavior in the… S-H-I-T P-O-S-T-I-N-G communities. I don’t go to aneurysmposting to complain that the posts are hard to understand…
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.
They aren’t meant to be the star of the show. Their purpose is to be in the crowd and agitate. They’re the devil that whispers people’s ear.
Bots would have proven to the a failure if a botnet went down and culture wars vanished. Their intention is to manipulate people. Not to wholesale substitute to the population.
Besides the name itself seems to go over heads. Bot farms don’t operate out of a centralized server. They’re not even bots literally. These operations are farmed out to locations around the world. Sometimes they’re real human trolls.
But there don’t need to be trolls, or people deliberately put there by Russia to spread propaganda. There are plenty of people that already do this out of their own accord. Mostly the kind that also believe in other dumb things.
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But the unsourced graph said it did!
This is a much better article: https://piefed.nl/post/213693
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?
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.
You don’t think they already have this?
Why do you think this story blew up so much, being largely misinformation?
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.
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.
‘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.
(Dead link)
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/lemmy.mlshows no change.This domain is for sale
???
It made Fedi news https://cake.kobel.fyi/c/fediverse@lemmy.world/p/225784/fediverse-observer-is-offline-and-no-longer-being-developed
Okay that’s strange um I guess you can use others:
https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fediparty/wiki/instance-monitoring-sites
fediDB still works
OK thanks um I guess
edit: pixelfed.social - for photo sharing only - is the 2nd largest in most metrics.
Sorry https://fedidb.com/servers/lemmy.ml is the url for monitoring lemmy.ml the statistics do look like there’s a tiny slump but nothing significant to warrant accusing Yandex bot usage.
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.
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.
No one will learn anything from this.
Certain reddit communities gotta be a ghost town now
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.
