cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/11858823
…
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.
…
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.
…
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…
…
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.
…
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].
…
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.
…
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.