Apparently engagement on that other site’s r/conservative dropped by 2/3 when Russian data centers went down due to drone strikes.

  • saarth@lemmy.world
    296·
    1 day ago

    You know what, I have been working in Social listening (analysis of social media) for the last 8 or so years and since morning I have been seeing this claim about Russian data centers and activity on r/Conservative, and it has been smelling of propaganda and annoying me all day.

    It’s almost 1 am in the morning and I just realised I have the tools to prove or disprove this. So I got up and in 5 minutes I was able get the data.

    Americans are really getting real good at propaganda for sure.

    • Wildmimic@anarchist.nexusEnglish
      8·
      24 hours ago

      There seems to be a big difference on Twitter tho: https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/politics/reform-figures-see-social-media-engagement-drop-after-strikes-on-russia-data-centres-410517/

      Account of Reform’s Richard Tice, which has 400k followers and who normally has 100k+views on their posts and thousands of likes and comments now struggles to reach above 35k views and even 100 comments and retweets.

      Nigel Farage himself with his 2.3m followers has also lost a lot of “engagement”, with his content normally reaching hundreds of thousands of views, and now he’s struggling to hit 100k and gets only a fraction of the normal amount of comments and likes.

      Edit: I hypothesize that reddit bots are less hosted on Yandex and more on other (western) infrastructure, while Twitter bots seem to come mainly from Yandex.

      • saarth@lemmy.world
        8·
        22 hours ago

        There could be multiple reasons for this.

        1. The bots are used only for generating engagement and not posting. So engagements went down, posts didn’t.
        2. The bots are used on Twitter and not on Reddit so twitter was impacted but reddit wasn’t. Kinda likely considering twitter loves bots and reddit has been cracking down on them.
        3. Engagement is not a very transparent metric, and depends on a lot of factors like when content is posted, the quality of the content, seasknality, etc. There can be multiple things affecting engagement.
        • Wildmimic@anarchist.nexusEnglish
          1·
          18 hours ago

          I also heard that on Threads there is now a strange silence around anything “culture wars”-related btw, while Facebook doesn’t seem to be fazed at all. So the Yandex infrastructure seems to have been the staging area for specific platforms, while others are being manipulated from other sites.

          • saarth@lemmy.world
            1·
            17 hours ago

            I have yet to see credible evidence that any kind of social media activity went down in the last 2-3 days. To me this seems like journalists and politicians capitalising on what people want to hear.

            • Wildmimic@anarchist.nexusEnglish
              1·
              17 hours ago

              The Twitter numbers seem pretty solid for me - most engagement numbers are achieved in the first 24 hours of posting content on twitter (there are outliers, but it’s a valid assumption). The next weeks will tell how much this perceived drop is really from Yandex going down.

    • MrVilliam@sh.itjust.works
      261·
      1 day ago

      I’ll be the idiot who admits to being an idiot. What does this graph mean? Is that just raw mentions of “r/conservative” across the internet as grouped by day? Is it meaningful to see spikes alternating with dips? If what the meme is saying were true, what would this graph look like and why? I’m far from an expert in this and I’m curious.

      • Baguette@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        121·
        1 day ago

        I don’t really see how mentions of the subreddit is meaningful of how many bots there were. There are so many posts about r/conservative being down from other subreddits that I can’t see the correlation

        • MrVilliam@sh.itjust.works
          3·
          1 day ago

          Same, which is why I’m assuming that I’m misinterpreting what I’m looking at. My interpretation doesn’t make any sense, but for somebody who’s never looked at whatever that is, that’s what it looks like it’s saying? It’s probably obvious to people who look at that shit every day, but I’m not sure if the “mentions” are correlating to what’s in the search bar looking thing or what. Or maybe “mentions” is jargon with a different meaning? Idk.

      • saarth@lemmy.world
        5·
        1 day ago

        It’s not mentions of r/conservative, it’s mentions (posts and comments) in the subreddit.

      • saarth@lemmy.world
        4·
        1 day ago

        Because it’s a quick search and not a dedicated query, I guess the historical data collection is stopping at 56 days instead of going all the way to 60. Same thing happens when I look at any other sub.