cross-posted from : https://lemmy.zip/post/73193700
Claims that Ukrainian strikes on Russian data centres reduced Kremlin-linked bot networks have spread widely online, but experts have told BBC Verify there is no evidence the attacks have significantly reduced them.
Researchers from dTeam, a US-based group that tracks Moscow-linked influence operations, told BBC Verify there has not been “any traffic change from known Russian accounts and bot clusters on any platform”.
Bots linked to pro-Kremlin influence operations like Storm-1516 and Matryoshka - both of which BBC Verify has previously reported on - were still active on social media on Tuesday, evidence shared with BBC Verify by dTeam shows.
I think it’s possible a lot of Russian bots are still good old fashion people paid low wages spamming us all manually.
I’ve seen the spam racks. Not of russian trolls but of chinese commercial bot farms which I heard are same as Russian troll farms. It’s basically one person with a rack of 10-20 phones. I don’t know exact operation procedures but my guess would be it’s a mix of manual and screen scraped process. Maybe phone automation is better now so it’s more automated but human labor is so cheap in these countries that it makes no sense not to at least have someone on admin role.
Yeah, but they’d likely still be using tools out of those data centers.
Almost certainly. Those tools may have been down for minutes or even hours before failing over to another daya center (governments are too slow to have automatic redundancy yet)
Absolutely. What we really need is to cut russia off from the internet entirely and see what happens then. I predict a lot of good things.
theyd just use vpn’s to bypass the restriction
Not blocking them, literally cut the cables.