Yes. It’s hard to prove because ruzi trolls are mostly real people with 24 phones proxied through real resisential/mobile ips. But, these ops still need datacenters to orchestrate everything etc. So the trolls are not destroyed just inconvenienced temporarily.
There will be very good research here in some time as it takes a lot of work to put this together as social networks do not have accessible research apis anymore. So to analyze content sentiment you need a lot of resources but there are other metrics like tracking resource utilization (like proxy pools) etc. With all that I think a good lab could produce good evidence if they wanted. The bigger problem is - why? We’re already well aware of ruzi troll networks.
Depends on what you call bots. Yandex is a Russian search service, so it needs to constantly crawl the web, just like Google or god forbid - DuckDuckGo. This traffic is 43% down, and not what Lemmy calls bots.
is it true, though?
Yes. It’s hard to prove because ruzi trolls are mostly real people with 24 phones proxied through real resisential/mobile ips. But, these ops still need datacenters to orchestrate everything etc. So the trolls are not destroyed just inconvenienced temporarily.
There will be very good research here in some time as it takes a lot of work to put this together as social networks do not have accessible research apis anymore. So to analyze content sentiment you need a lot of resources but there are other metrics like tracking resource utilization (like proxy pools) etc. With all that I think a good lab could produce good evidence if they wanted. The bigger problem is - why? We’re already well aware of ruzi troll networks.
Depends on what you call bots. Yandex is a Russian search service, so it needs to constantly crawl the web, just like Google or god forbid - DuckDuckGo. This traffic is 43% down, and not what Lemmy calls bots.
I don’t think DuckDuckGo does any crawling, it just searches Bing for you.
DuckDuckGo is just over 9000 Microsoft Edge running in background