cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/11858823
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Over the weekend, Ukraine carried out a co-ordinated drone strike against several major Russian data centres. This completely decimated Russia’s Yandex, … which controls more than 70% of search traffic in the country, and has reportedly resulted in a dramatic fall in bot traffic from the Yandex network.
As per the bot analysts at Tom’s Hardware, bot traffic from the Yandex network has dropped to just 0.4% of the maximum number of HTTP requests recorded in the past two weeks. That means activity from automated, Russian-hosted accounts has been virtually eliminated on social media.
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As a result, the social media engagement on posts from [far-right] Reform UK figures appears to have dropped in the wake of Ukrainian strikes on Russian data centres.
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There has already been a strong and significant impact on bot traffic in countries such as France and Germany.
David Colon, a French information operations researcher, has noted a huge difference in the performance of narratives generated by the Russia-linked information operations group, Storm-1516.
The silencing of the bots also appears to have caused a dramatic drop in activity around Germany’s far-right AfD…
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Amongst others, the article is citing Britain’s Reform politician Richard Tice. Three posts on X from the Reform deputy leader to his almost 400,000 followers on Monday, 11 October [hadn’t] hit triple figures for reposts or comments, with one not even reaching 10,000 views … Before the Ukrainian strikes on the Russia data centres, Tice’s posts got considerably more engagement, consistently hitting triple figures for comments and reposts, whilst racking up hundreds of thousands of views.
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A similar pattern can be seen when it comes to other far-right figures such as Nigel Farage [the linked article is given evidence about that].
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As Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky himself said after the strikes on Russian data centres, it’s suddenly become a “little easier to breathe” on social media.
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.ml checks out lol
Oh yeah? You’re of the opinion that bot traffic was affected by strikes on a search engine data center?? Please explain your reasoning and provide some proof, lmfao.
Yandex is a cloud provider, like Google. They host government workloads, again like Google does. Do you still believe Google only has search engine data centers too, dinosaur?
It is highly likely government workloads were running on the Yandex servers that were struck. That’s just how modern compute works. Whole lot of different things running in the same data centers, and government is probably paying the most
The part most people are getting wrong, and that you accidentally got right, is that government workloads would just failover elsewhere
Disinformation campaigns are strategically important for Russia. They would obviously implement disaster recovery plans. They would be down for less than an hour
Do you still need me to provide proof to you that Yandex does cloud compiting? I will just be giving you a passive-aggressive LMGTFY link
If you honestly need me to prove that to you, you understand too little about computing for this discussion to be worthwhile
I know I’m right, you didn’t need to tell me. Good work though 👍
Computer in data center. Computer run bot as documented. Data center goes boom. Bot not run anymore
Wise one say: Why use many word when good strike do trick? :p
Data center not used for bots. Data center used for search index. Google if confused.
Yandex not search engine only; you learn to search please. https://yandex.cloud/en/solutions/web-hosting
Great, so how did it affect bot activity?
Negatively :)
Prove it, lol
And AWS only runs Amazon, Azure only runs Microsoft services etc then?
Oh now we’re talking in full sentences?
Different person
My b
Username doesn’t check out
Yeah I haven’t blocked too many people but I’m about block this guy. It’s obvious he’s a tankie shill.
Fuck Russia but also fuck liberals who are so desperate for news about “tankie bots” being bombed that they’ll repeat untrue propaganda bullshit for 3 days.
How original
data centers house computers that can be rented by potential users for multitenancy use. it is extremely popular to run distributed workloads, like bot farms, on this hardware. all of the major cloud providers, AWS, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, GoDaddy, Rackspace, Alibaba, Hetzner, DigitalOcean, Yandex, Baidu, are hosting massive numbers of bots that could be employed to do a multitude of things.
So surely there is empirical evidence of bot traffic being reduced if you guys are all so confident about it, right?
https://radar.cloudflare.com/outage-center
https://radar.cloudflare.com/traffic/as13238
https://radar.cloudflare.com/traffic/as200350
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9y7l0pm8jkko
Got anything better?
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/data-centers/russian-disinformation-bot-traffic-nearly-eliminated-overnight-after-ukraine-drone-strikes-cripple-multiple-of-russias-google-data-centers-ukraine-intensifies-bombing-of-yandex-data-centers-in-response-to-moscows-strikes-on-kyiv-data-centers
this is the context people are talking about. i can’t say for certain if i think know it’s true. all i can really say for sure is that i’ve seen a lot less pro-fascist activity online (which is also backed by the article you originally posted about)
It’s likely not true. Search engine indexing could easily be 99% of all HTTP requests from Yandex.
Additionally, we can just apply some critical thinking to the situation by imaging ourselves as Russia:
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.
Additionally, there is no evidence that post counts in these right wing communities has measurably dropped at all.
Right, the article that’s been proven wrong dozens of times all over this site. You’re parroting something proven to be false, while you weren’t even sure it was true. Do you not see how that is worthy of ridicule?
has it? i hadn’t seen that. can you send me an example of how it was disproven?
Hot off the press
so my conclusion from reading this article is where i was when we started, and it basically says what i was saying: we don’t have enough evidence to conclude one direction or another what was running in those yandex data centers and what impacts we should expect to be seeing
Many people are incorrect with their assertion that Russian bot farms have been significantly affected by the attacks. Compute tasks would jave failed over to the next available data center
You are incorrect in your assumption, which is notnsupported by your article, that Russian disinformation campaigns did not use Yandex compute at all. Of fucking course they use it. It’s by far the cheapest and most reloable source of compute they have
As with many topics, the reality is nuanced in a way the average person fails to grasp
aww it’s a baby 6 day old sea lion
Nah had to make a new account. Would love to see some proof of bot traffic going down though, while you’re here.
Why’d you have to make a new one, hmm?
I forgot my password and am not giving my email for a recovery, lol
Ok that’s reasonable I guess