cross-posted from : https://lemmy.zip/post/73193700
Claims that Ukrainian strikes on Russian data centres reduced Kremlin-linked bot networks have spread widely online, but experts have told BBC Verify there is no evidence the attacks have significantly reduced them.
Researchers from dTeam, a US-based group that tracks Moscow-linked influence operations, told BBC Verify there has not been “any traffic change from known Russian accounts and bot clusters on any platform”.
Bots linked to pro-Kremlin influence operations like Storm-1516 and Matryoshka - both of which BBC Verify has previously reported on - were still active on social media on Tuesday, evidence shared with BBC Verify by dTeam shows.
I think people would be well served to understand some underlying concepts here
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Modern compute operates like a fungible commodity. You can run your workload on almost any data center, and can generally switch with minimal friction
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Bot farms and influence campaigns are a high priority for the Russian government
Given these 2 facts, we can make some inferences from what happened. Even with 3 Yandex data centers struck, we would expect any bot farms operating from Yandex to stay alive, or quickly return depending on how failover is implemented
We would expect to see the lowest value compute to be pushed out of the commodity market. Things like crawlers, free services, and time insensitive processes
If bot farms were running in a hit data center, we could expect to see a short drop as they fail over and restart. That’s something inly data analytics at Meta, X, Reddit, etc. Could accurately detect
BBC was methodologically flawed here. They’re looking only for Yandex activity and IPs. For obvious reasons any bot farms would be egressing through IPs/devices not associated with a data center. Those would not change, just where the computational portion of the bot farm is ran
We probably won’t know for sure what was affected for a decade or more, but it is very likely Kremlin compute is run at Yandex data centers, the same as how the US government runs a lot of compute on AWS/GCP/Azure
Finally someone gets it. Seeing misinformation spread because everyone wants to be right is painful.
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Is Putin right to say he has an agreement with the US to provide diesel fuel when there is a well-known fuel shortage in Russia?
Is Putin right to say he’s ready for a peace agreement as soon as Ukraine announces a cease fire and returns all disputed territory? While completely ignoring the Ukranian civilian death toll, the deliberate bombing of schools and hospitals, and the mass kidnapping of Ukranian children?
Is Netanyahu right to say there is a cease fire with Palestinians even as Israel continues to shoot civilians, bomb hospitals and schools, and seize occupied territory?
Is Trump right to say the murder of Iranian civilians and bombing infrastructure, schools & hospitals was justified due to the lack of a nuclear agreement when HE alone is the moron who cancelled the existing agreement that worked for a lot less money than his war is costing simply because he doesn’t like that the agreement was brokered by President Obama who also received a Nobel Peace prize as a result?
Is Trump right to say Venezuelans welcomed US interference even as protests persist and the country’s economy is in free-fall and elections have been postponed?
Is mainstream media right to largely ignore all of the above and politely look away any time the Epstein files are mentioned, any witnesses release statements, or when other countries have no problem investigating & incarcerating the billionaires involved (Unless he happens to be Prince Andrew)? And somehow forget Trump’s name appears in Epstein’s seized files more times than that of Jesus’ name in the entire bible?
So many big questions to ask, but yeah, let’s endlessly debate how many troll farms Zelensky bombed in Russia.
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Let’s not draw a conclusion from a single data point. Blow up a few more data centers, observe the results, and again, and again.
Once we have a sufficient amount of peer review and replicable data, then we can determine if a reduction in misinformation bot activity is or is not among the plethora of other benefits of blowing up data centers.
For science!
Couldnt hurt to try
Zelensky? He was like one of the last people to say it out loud.
So tired of these propagandistic pieces.
This has been up for thirty minutes and no one has showed up telling you how zelenski is a war criminal or some nonsense. Maybe he’s on to something.
He looks tired
You’d be tired too if you had his job.
Reminds me of how Obama aged 20 years after his first term
So did Bush
Yes
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There is NO Russian interference in elections or online propaganda or covert murders on political opponents abroad or terrorist actions or incursions on sovereign borders, comrade.
All is good, go back to consuming.
tldr: no, fake bot accounts were not affected, only bots like Yandex search engine crawlers
They did not say fake bot accounts were not affected.
They did clarify that they meant search crawlers and the like. Those things are not the same.
Since a lot of people here (myself included) also misinterpreted the recent news, here are some excerpts for those who haven’t read the article.
If I had to guess, I’d say that you don’t need a data center to run a social media bot that spits out the same generic inflammatory lines all day.
Claims that Ukrainian strikes on Russian data centres reduced Kremlin-linked bot networks have spread widely online, but experts have told BBC Verify there is no evidence the attacks have significantly reduced them.
Viral social media posts have claimed there has been a significant drop in influence operations in recent days, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky suggesting on Monday there was “less hate, less division and fewer provocations” online because of “fewer bots”.
But claims these attacks have affected Russian disinformation operations, including accounts posting supportive messages about groups including the Make American Great Again (MAGA) movement in the US and the far-right AfD party in Germany, appear to have come from a misinterpretation of data produced by tech firm Cloudflare.
Some social media users have been sharing charts of Cloudflare data which show bot activity using Yandex’s network has declined.
While bots are commonly associated with fake social media accounts that may post false, divisive and inflammatory content, they are also used to automate tasks like scanning web pages so they appear on search engines.
Cloudflare clarified its data includes all automated internet requests to websites hosted on its network, including bots crawling websites for information.
The company also said the drop off was “not necessarily bot behaviour on social media platforms”.
Researchers from dTeam, a US-based group that tracks Moscow-linked influence operations, told BBC Verify there has not been “any traffic change from known Russian accounts and bot clusters on any platform”.
They added that if the offices of known groups involved in these operations “were in flames then we would see a change”.
Bots linked to pro-Kremlin influence operations like Storm-1516 and Matryoshka - both of which BBC Verify has previously reported on - were still active on social media on Tuesday, evidence shared with BBC Verify by dTeam shows.
If I had to guess, I’d say that you don’t need a data center to run a social media bot that spits out the same generic inflammatory lines all day.
Nah, they almost certainly are using compute. The main thing people are getting wrong is disaster recovery. These days you can have automatic, seamless failover. You could nuke a data center in active use and barely notice a blip as an end user
I doubt the Russian government would be using advanced modern failover though. I assume they’re lile the US government. Old school failover with modern data center atchitecture. Parity across data centers, when the primary site goes offline, secondary spins up. Downtime between minutes and hours depending on how well it’s designed
We won’t know for sure for a decade or more, but I’d expect Russian government compute to have been running at those data centers, and I’d expect a disaster recovery plan to have made that attack little more than a blip for them. I envy the data scientists at social media giants that will be able to dig through the data
And for the record, you did not misread the news. It’s intentional disinformarion. This is a war, and wars are rife with propaganda
It’s intentional disinformarion. This is a war, and wars are rife with propaganda
The problem is that this could also end up furthering disinformation.
If a user without tech knowledge interprets this news as “the fake right wing bots were shut down”, but still sees accounts on their social media posting during that time, they might start to believe that those accounts are real people in their community.
I hope there was a dip in social media bots, but I don’t want to be saying that unless I see more evidence for it. The existing evidence mentioned in the article has been followed up with clarifications / retractions by the people that shared it
- Cloudflare clarified what their graph represents
- The Czech member of Parliament, who shared a popular post, “has since said he ‘did not present it as a clear fact’”
- “Zelensky’s office told BBC Verify the president was “talking about the atmosphere on social media” rather than a fall in bot activity. It added it had seen “reports of fewer provocative and hateful comments” from many social media users.”
To be clear, I appreciate your explanation and I agree that it’s plausible. It is also possible that both things are true (they use data centers, but the fake accounts people were monitoring are running out of different data centers).
I think it’s possible a lot of Russian bots are still good old fashion people paid low wages spamming us all manually.
I’ve seen the spam racks. Not of russian trolls but of chinese commercial bot farms which I heard are same as Russian troll farms. It’s basically one person with a rack of 10-20 phones. I don’t know exact operation procedures but my guess would be it’s a mix of manual and screen scraped process. Maybe phone automation is better now so it’s more automated but human labor is so cheap in these countries that it makes no sense not to at least have someone on admin role.
Yeah, but they’d likely still be using tools out of those data centers.
Almost certainly. Those tools may have been down for minutes or even hours before failing over to another daya center (governments are too slow to have automatic redundancy yet)
Absolutely. What we really need is to cut russia off from the internet entirely and see what happens then. I predict a lot of good things.
theyd just use vpn’s to bypass the restriction
Not blocking them, literally cut the cables.
I’ve been accused of being a Russian bot countless times, even though I’m just a rando from Spain. I think the whole Russian bot thing is blown out of proportion.
Thanks for the warning. Blocked.
