cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/11858823
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Over the weekend, Ukraine carried out a co-ordinated drone strike against several major Russian data centres. This completely decimated Russia’s Yandex, … which controls more than 70% of search traffic in the country, and has reportedly resulted in a dramatic fall in bot traffic from the Yandex network.
As per the bot analysts at Tom’s Hardware, bot traffic from the Yandex network has dropped to just 0.4% of the maximum number of HTTP requests recorded in the past two weeks. That means activity from automated, Russian-hosted accounts has been virtually eliminated on social media.
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As a result, the social media engagement on posts from [far-right] Reform UK figures appears to have dropped in the wake of Ukrainian strikes on Russian data centres.
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There has already been a strong and significant impact on bot traffic in countries such as France and Germany.
David Colon, a French information operations researcher, has noted a huge difference in the performance of narratives generated by the Russia-linked information operations group, Storm-1516.
The silencing of the bots also appears to have caused a dramatic drop in activity around Germany’s far-right AfD…
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Amongst others, the article is citing Britain’s Reform politician Richard Tice. Three posts on X from the Reform deputy leader to his almost 400,000 followers on Monday, 11 October [hadn’t] hit triple figures for reposts or comments, with one not even reaching 10,000 views … Before the Ukrainian strikes on the Russia data centres, Tice’s posts got considerably more engagement, consistently hitting triple figures for comments and reposts, whilst racking up hundreds of thousands of views.
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A similar pattern can be seen when it comes to other far-right figures such as Nigel Farage [the linked article is given evidence about that].
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As Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky himself said after the strikes on Russian data centres, it’s suddenly become a “little easier to breathe” on social media.
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From the article:
That… is not what that means. The HTTP requests graphed by Cloudflare shown in the Tom’s Hardware article are the yandex web crawler. This is traffic from YandexBot, which is their search engine’s equivalent to GoogleBot. That drop in traffic doesn’t indicate anything whatsoever about russian-hosted accounts on social media, it’s about a search engine’s bots reading web pages. 🤦
Note that the TomsHardware article graph comes from here: https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots/as13238 - this is one of Yandex’s AS numbers. In case you doubt that the traffic cloudlfare calls “bot traffic” there is really just the YandexBot, and you really want to believe that maybe Cloudflare is classifying social-media-posting HTTP requests as “bots” in that graph, you can check their graph for YandexBot specifically here https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots/directory/yandex and you’ll see:
Besides grossly mischaracterizing what the Tom’s Hardware article says by implying that the YandexBot web crawler has something to do with the kind of bots they’re talking about, this The London Economic article also cites some slightly more plausible sounding evidence for reduced social media activity:
Could British fascists be getting retweets from bot farms in a yandex datacenter? Sure, they’re a cloud provider, they’re no doubt hosting some stuff like that.
But, does this example actually demonstrate it? No. The first yandex datacenter strike was on October 8; here is a tweet from @TiceRichard from October 6 with only 10 replies and 6 retweets:
If there has actually been a measurable drop in “inauthentic” social media posts (or other retweets or likes or whatever) as a result of the yandex datacenter strikes, I still haven’t seen evidence of it.
Another lm account playing down the reality.
Besides grossly mischaracterizing what the article says by picking one incident and reframing it.
The http requests are even one piece of information in in this article. There is much more than this, and the entire investigation provides strong evidence that the European far-right’s media engagement dropped significantly due to the elimination of Russian bots.
The same appears to be true here on Lemmy as many users in other threads have also said. It shows once again that tankie and the far-right are more similar than they would admit?
Then show us this strong evidence, preferably in the same quality as the previous post. But all your evidence is always “some guy I know said it” while other people are actually trying to investigate the graphs. Even many other media outlets already debunked it as misleading, like the BBC and also the German fact-finder. But those are also all Tankies, right? It doesn’t matter that some people might be against Russia but still do care for the truthful statements. Everyone who isn’t completely blinded by ideology is just a Tankie.
The previous post is an ml propaganda account.
Where did the recent drop in social media engagement of European far-right party members come from? I posted an article yesterday with examples for that, and everyone can go these accounts looking it up.
Can you prove there’s even been a drop? The article did not. It compares old posts to new ones when old ones have had more time to accumulate views and retweets. Would need access to historical data to actually know anything e.g average retweets after first 24 hours or something like that
Yes, I looked into the persons account. A 5 year old account which is repeatedly looking for better evidence regarding this topic while asserting that this given data does not meet the proper quality standards. Also strongly investigated in open source products and a stand against AI code. As I just said: Everyone who isn’t exactly following your rhetoric is a Tankie and a propaganda account.
tbh I believe you are a Tankie. By undermining western discourse culture you are a false flag operation payed by Putin to discredit European ideals. Makes sense, right?
Gonna stop you right there. Arthur Besse is proven tankie and tardigrade is proven to not be one. Both of em tend to be campists though. Arthur being the anti-west kind. Tardigrade being the pro-west kind.
I’m not going to stalk through another persons complete user history, but judging from this comment chain, I remember times where tankie meant ‘defending unapologetically the terrors of Stalin’ and not ‘pointing out deficiencies in western journalist standards’, but I guess words and meanings are quite fluent these days.
Arthur Besse isn’t called a tankie because of this thread, but because it has been already substantiated for more than a year that he’s a tankie. For people who can see who deleted what in the modlog, Arthur deletes comments for rather mild critiques of the CCP and Marxist-Leninist figures all the time. Dessalines is a lot more present on that though.
imagine thinking this is a propaganda account, lmao 😭
This post? That is the same article as is linked in this post, and exactly what I did look up to verify in my comment at the top of this very thread.
I admittedly only checked their first example, to be fair, but given that the fascist who’s lack-of-retweets they’re saying is evidence also had just 6 RTs on a tweet before the strikes… I expect to find the similar non-evidence in the other two also.
To be clear: I don’t doubt that those chuds have lots of fake followers, and they probably do buy twitter engagement, and sure they could be buying it from Russia… I’m just saying the narrative about these yandex strikes causing a drop in inauthentic behavior appears to be bogus as far as I can tell.
You are just as convinced that you don’t blatantly spread propaganda as tardigrade. You two calling the other propagandists when you both are reminds me of the spidermans pointing at each other meme.
i assume you’re probably saying i “spread propaganda” because i posted something you disagreed with elsewhere, but do you actually think i’m spreading propaganda here in this thread? i am honestly, out of personal curiosity, trying to determine if there is any truth in this narrative about the yandex datacenter strikes. i think i’ve been clear that i’m not actually absolutely certain that there is not, but so far all of the “evidence” for it i’ve seen presented is falling apart.
I am saying you spread propaganda because it has been proven time and time again that you do. Same goes for tardigrade. In this instance, tardigrade is more wrong, because the claims have been partially debunked.
PS: Also nowhere did I say it was propaganda in this instance, but that you are known to spread propaganda in general.
you didn’t say it but you strongly implied it by saying in this thread that i “spread propaganda” without mentioning (until your later comments, thanks) that you don’t actually think what i’m saying here is “propaganda” (by which you mean, i infer, “incorrect”).
proven! lol ok, sorry i missed my trial 😂
fwiw depending on the definition of propaganda i could actually agree with you - a lot of what i post is advocacy for something (as is some of what you post).
eg, looking at a few of my recent posts: is this propaganda? or this? or this? i would say all three definitely are, in the sense that they are politically motivated communication, and i stand by them.
but you’re obviously using the term “propaganda” in its pejorative sense because you disagree with (some) of what you’ve seen me advocating for (and/or agree with other things you’ve seen me debunking), which imo is intellectually dishonest. rather than say “i disagree with arthur about XYZ, but in this case the evidence is lacking for the claims being debunked in this thread” you just said that i “blatantly spread propaganda” and drew a spiderman meme equivalency between me and the other person who you now acknowledge (thanks) is “more wrong” in this case.
I’ve seen a lot of reports of a severe drop in right wing engagement. How do you account for that?
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I’m seeing a lot of people saying that, and a lot of articles reporting on people saying that, but none that actually shows data that specifically showcases numbers.
This article shows some far right politicians having low engagement numbers; someone pointed out that even their older posts (which precede the Yandex attacks) had the same low level of engagement. Then they showcase bad responses to Trump’s tweets.
All this is on X which I don’t have an account for, but even then that’s at best annecdotal, but even correctly reported annecdotes would be better than the reporting I’ve seen so far.
I’m seeing a lot of people saying things but no evidence.