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.
…
Here’s one (was too large to upload it to Lemmy). I could keep scrolling, but you probably get the picture.
Sorry I don’t go on twitter please explain it like I just landed on this planet. Don’t get me wrong I’ve been sharing the OP’s link where I can.
The whole Yandex is just a search engine crawler is such tanky bs (they do hosting too).
I haven’t seen anybody saying that. Can you show me any examples of people saying “Yandex is just a search engine crawler”?
The cloudflare traffic graph which was being used as the primary piece of evidence for this story is solely about Yandex’s search engine crawler’s traffic, but that isn’t really disputable (even the BBC acknowledged it). Here I explicitly mention that Yandex is also a cloud provider which certainly could be hosting bot farms - it’s just that the supposed evidence of a reduction in social media activity after the strikes doesn’t seem to hold up afaict.
Top one is Trump’s post. The rest is replies to him. The ads sprinkled in are in German. 1 T in the top right corner of each one means “1 day” which is how old the post/replies are.
Would you normally see a lot of praise on a trump post? Remember I live under a rock if twitter is concerned.
Not a clue. He made his own social media platform a year or so back and I only look at Twitter if it’s some NFL news I can’t find elsewhere.
Then I have no idea what Redditquaza is trying to say with their link