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

  • Wildmimic@anarchist.nexusEnglish
    8·
    1 day 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·
      1 day 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·
        23 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·
          22 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·
            22 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.