Experts say there is no evidence that Russian trolls have been affected by Ukraine’s Yandex attacks.

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.

  • Taldan@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    8 hours ago

    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

    • Otter@lemmy.caEnglish
      1·
      58 minutes ago

      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).