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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I’m a little less concerned about the Russian bots than all the American platforms that have been allowing and tolerating this for decades now.
You motherfuckers rebuilt Europe only to throw it to fascism again 100 years later.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrscWBP3lOg
Pretty good report - essentially nope.
Probably, they were debunking the graph. Russia doesn’t keep a public facing graph for how many bots they have online.
The BBC has debunked the claims in this article.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9y7l0pm8jkko
Misinformation can come from anywhere.
Exactly. Hate to say it, but most of the political bot farms are likely not in Russia, but in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh etc. it’s cheap to hire people there, and X has once already debunked that plenty of far right traffic comes from India.
Also debunked independently by German Netzpolitik https://netzpolitik.org/2026/angriffe-auf-yandex-aus-brennenden-rechenzentren-in-russland-wird-kein-bot-ausfall-bei-der-afd/
Misinformation works on 95% of audience who hear what they like to hear. Sources are optional.
I can’t wait to see how different the internet is when Israeli data centres get hit.
The Ukrainians responsible for this attack and its blatant results are heroes.
Now, how to identify, worldwide, the bot servers and destroy them all?
Simple. Destroy all servers. No Internet, no bots.
They were debunking the graph. Russia doesn’t keep a public facing graph for how many bots they have online.
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An 8-day old ml account that has already been banned from another community… and you are even complaining about disinformation.
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I ‘defended’ this choice several times, just read it.
Also I’ve been a lurker for years, and this isn’t my first account. Grow the fuck up and delete your bullshit propaganda.
Thank you for your sophisticated and polite response.
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let’s now bomb the indian, chinese, american, israeli or any other bot farms and data centers and live in an utopia.
You CAN just turn off your Internet access if you want to.
From the article:
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.
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:
Take Richard Tice for example. Below are three posts on X from the Reform deputy leader to his almost 400,000 followers on Monday, 11 October. At the time of writing, none of the posts had hit triple figures for reposts or comments, with one not even reaching 10,000 views.
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
The previous post is an ml propaganda account.
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.
The previous post is an ml propaganda account.
imagine thinking this is a propaganda account, lmao 😭
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.
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.
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.
Not only in Europe, when you look at the tweets of the White House from today, you basically don’t see any MAGA replies under them and almost exclusively criticism which is genuinely insane compared to the situation a week ago.
I’d love to see some screenshots.
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).
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
Fantastic timing for the US midterms, and a great move!
Maybe that was what the disagreement between Zelensky and the Orange-in-Chief was really about? How was again the slogan, “Data is the new Oil”, wasn’t it?
Telling, isn’t it?
😂
Yall have the most impressive ability to see what you want to see.
I agree that this observation is anecdotal.
So. Just so the internet gets usable again, we need a gofundme-campaign for ongoing long range strikes on data centers.
we need a gofundme-campaign for ongoing long range strikes on data centers.
Ask and you shall receive the official Ukrainian defensive war donation site
Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, there are still a lot of fucked up actual people around
Yea. But my ethics dictate not to use cruise missiles or drones on them, so I prefer hardware losses 🤷♂️
Same here, but I just don’t think this was enough to make the internet as a whole usable again.
You can actually keep up with the misinformation, though, when it isn’t amplified a thousand times.
Your ethics are cowardly and shitty. Only one thing ever stopped Nazis.
Psudeoscience and the accompanying drug use.
See, instead of outing yourself as moron, you could have asked: I’m pro defensive actions, especially on Ukrainians ground. I’m pro long strike missiles on strategic targets. I’m against indifferent targeting of civilian life like the Russians do it.
So… anything to add?
But they won’t get a feedback loop from bots that make them more visible and more fucked up.
This is just
one facilitythree facilities. I’m sure there are loads of them scattered worldwide trying to destabilise western democracies.Those three supposedly are over half of Yandex’s compute capacity. The rest are in striking distance too.
I’m not trying to downplay the value of what the Ukrainian army has achieved!
My point was about the hyperbolical comment that the internet would return to its normal usable form. I don’t want to sound too pessimistic, but Yandex isn’t the only one in Russia, nor is Russia the only country in the world trying to destabilise the west through the spread of misinformation.
Sure, but one less is still less of them.
Absolutely. The more the better
The internet will never be “pure” or a utopian wonderland, but taking out significant sources of bot traffic definitely make it better.
It would be trivial to just set up the operation on AWS or Microsoft servers in the US. I guess the reason the have not done it is that the US would have full insight in the software, users and social media accounts they’re using, which might be an issue if the government changes.
Sí, Señor.
This should be national news in every country it affected significantly. What more proof is needed that democracies are under siege and it’s working to manipulate elections? Countries should invest massively in preventing this kind of propaganda and defending their democracies.
But tankies told me that Russia is a peaceful democratic country, and that Russia has no will whatsoever to act aggressively towards its neighbours, even on the internet.
In fact, tankies told me that westerners are the only people in the world who are ever aggressive, malicious, or evil.
The bbc are tankies?
Don’t know who you talked to. You can believe in communism AND say that Russia is a hostile pos of a state and that Putin is a war criminal and should be judge as so.
They said tankies, not communists
You’re absolutely right. Thanks for correcting me.
Yeah. Simping for authoritarian regimes, while larping leftists, has absolutely nothing to do with communism.
What does Putin have to do with communism? Except hating it.
Don’t know who you talked to. You can believe in communism AND say that Russia is a hostile pos of a state and that Putin is a war criminal and should be judge as so.
Yes, but not on any community on lemmy.ml…
You’ve apperently not talked to a lot of .lm users then.
Them “evil tankies” that “support” Russia only ever do so to take the (in their mind) lesser evil stance compared to what they see as complete western dominance in the region, were Russia to lose. Not that I agree with that, but it’s funny how nuance and lesser evilism only exist to you guys when it comes to absolve yourselves for voting for pedophile war criminals painted blue in America
I guess I see Ukraine as the “lesser evil” by far:
- Russia is invading and trying to dominate its smaller neighbours, while Ukraine isn’t
- The Russian state has seemingly carried out assassinations of people it didn’t like (Alexei Navalny, Alexander Litvinenko, Zelimkhan Khangoshvili) - I think Ukraine has only carried out assassinations of Russian military figures, and only after Russia launched a massive invasion of Ukraine
- Ukraine seems to allow protests which are critical of the government, while Russia hands out severe punishments, including long prison sentences, for activists who disagree with the Russian government
- According to the OSCE (Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe), of which Ukraine and Russia are both members, Ukraine’s 2019 presidential election “was competitive, voters had a broad choice and turned out in high numbers”, although it notes some criticisms of the process, while in Russia, the OSCE wasn’t even invited to the 2024 presidential election, perhaps because Russia knew they’d be rigging the vote
I’ve noticed that tankies like to point out that far-right figures exist in Ukraine. Yes they do. But they exist in Russia too. In fact, some Russian far-right figures have influence over the Russian government. Perhaps that’s why Russia is pursuing an imperialist foreign policy.
Edit: I just want to point out that I’m not saying the Ukrainian people or the Russian people are worse or better than the other side. I’m only talking about their governments. To me the current Ukrainian government seems like the “lesser evil” compared to the current Russian government.
Btw, nonconfrontational was banned for ban evasion. I permabanned their first account for trolling, toxicity and genocide denial and they decided to make another account with exactly the same name report someone they disagreed with probably thinking I wouldnt remember them or something.
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Yeah that’s fair, you won’t be seeing be defending the Russian government and in fact I agree with most of this. I just wanted to point out common hypocrisy I see in online spaces where a different, zero tolerance standard is applied when it comes to foreign policy
ok so why I vote for the lesser social democrat they all seem to want to kill me
Who told you that? Like specifically?
That reads pretty confrontational
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Asking like that — a tad bit, yeah
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Oh, thank you, you’re so considerate, a pleasure to meet such a nice person
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Not a single “Tankie” told you this. You’re just a liar.
It’s certainly the general gist of what tankies say.
Right, misrepresenting and exaggerating your “enemy” is just fine and normal behavior. Democracy totally works that way.
But But all the tankies are saying it was just web crawler bots. Surely finely honed suckers who shill for putin for free wouldn’t lie.
/s
Did .ml traffic drop?
i’ve been searching that but cannot find a reliable source. Those fails you can read in my comments.
We have been talking about the drop on twatter and reddit. The tankies have chimed in that it was only web crawlers. If you are not a tankie who really cares about ml traffic?
I got proudly banned from the usa community on .ml … Fuck those guys
Not only that, but JK Rowling’s supporters mysteriously vanished
I wonder if that will make any difference in Brazil’s runoff round of elections…, hopefully they can stay offline until the 25th, (or even Nov 3 would be nice)?
