European far-right parties see drop in social media engagement as Ukrainian strikes on Russian data centers eliminated Russian-hosted bot accounts
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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https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/politics/reform-figures-see-social-media-engagement-drop-after-strikes-on-russia-data-centres-410517/Open linkView original on scribe.disroot.org
86 replies
Absolute masterclass from the Ukrainins. Out here playing 4D chess by gutting those data centres. Slava Ukraini.
I think is was actually 2D chess, Russia started attacking Ukrainian data centers first and Ukraine just countered with symmetrical measures lol
So either Russia was stupid enough to start bombing datacenters first risking retaliation and exposing massive Russian influence.
Or the Ukrainians were cleaver to bomb the Russian propaganda machine bolstering right-wing fascists in Europe.
I don't care who's right, I'll just take it as an epic win either way.
That's deeply depressing and genuinely hilarious. The 2020s special.
I call it deprarious!
Well... Only one thing left to do: start a massive rave on the lookout
Thank you Ukraine!
Yeah, Nick Fuentes and Andrew Tate astroturf their engagement too.
I hate that it works, but it works.
Sort of like a Dyson fan. Move a little air to multiply a large volume.
Something that didn't change is islamophobia bots and zionazis propaganda
Ukraine targeted Russia, not Israel.
Russia has a good relation with Israel though and also push far right which are islamophobic
Different servers
those ones are based in small towns in the US.
Or, you know, Israel. Tel Aviv has a bunch of infrastructure. Not that there aren't in other newer data centres too, of course.
The servers sit in India. The people who pay them sit in Tel Aviv.
Didn’t they just install a bunch of servers in the White House basement?
"Why are none of my friends responding today?"
-- Nigel Farage
The lack of transphobia on Facebook now, even if only temporary, is a really nice change. People are suddenly so kind to each other, wth 😭
More of this please 🙏
Are there any stats from what has happened in Fediverse? There must have some effect, especially when (afaik) the fediverse does close to nothing to stop them.
Ban Facebook.
magats carry their own supply
Wonder why…🤔
This seems an unfounded assumption. Why would the Russian government be wholly dependant on a single private company for all their disinformation campaigns? I don't buy it
Further, what's with the assumption everywhere that the Russian government is entire incapable of basic disaster recovery? Every company I've worked for has DR plans for complete data center losses. We could fail over in under an hour, but Russia can't? Russia is actively at war. There is zero chance that didn't plan four this exact scenario
I just don't buy the narrative being pushed. Russia is responsible for a lot of disinformation. It's their bread and butter. They wouldn't be so unprepared for this attack that the average person would see effects days later
terraform apply?Your "counters" don't even make sense.
No they didn't, lmao.
.ml checks out lol
Oh yeah? You're of the opinion that bot traffic was affected by strikes on a search engine data center?? Please explain your reasoning and provide some proof, lmfao.
Computer in data center. Computer run bot as documented. Data center goes boom. Bot not run anymore
Wise one say: Why use many word when good strike do trick? :p
Data center not used for bots. Data center used for search index. Google if confused.
Yandex not search engine only; you learn to search please. https://yandex.cloud/en/solutions/web-hosting
Great, so how did it affect bot activity?
Negatively :)
And AWS only runs Amazon, Azure only runs Microsoft services etc then?
Oh now we're talking in full sentences?
Different person
Username doesn’t check out
Yeah I haven’t blocked too many people but I’m about block this guy. It’s obvious he’s a tankie shill.
Fuck Russia but also fuck liberals who are so desperate for news about "tankie bots" being bombed that they'll repeat untrue propaganda bullshit for 3 days.
How original
data centers house computers that can be rented by potential users for multitenancy use. it is extremely popular to run distributed workloads, like bot farms, on this hardware. all of the major cloud providers, AWS, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, GoDaddy, Rackspace, Alibaba, Hetzner, DigitalOcean, Yandex, Baidu, are hosting massive numbers of bots that could be employed to do a multitude of things.
So surely there is empirical evidence of bot traffic being reduced if you guys are all so confident about it, right?
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/data-centers/russian-disinformation-bot-traffic-nearly-eliminated-overnight-after-ukraine-drone-strikes-cripple-multiple-of-russias-google-data-centers-ukraine-intensifies-bombing-of-yandex-data-centers-in-response-to-moscows-strikes-on-kyiv-data-centers
this is the context people are talking about. i can't say for certain if i think know it's true. all i can really say for sure is that i've seen a lot less pro-fascist activity online (which is also backed by the article you originally posted about)
It’s likely not true. Search engine indexing could easily be 99% of all HTTP requests from Yandex.
Additionally, we can just apply some critical thinking to the situation by imaging ourselves as Russia:
If I am Russia, and I want to manipulate online opinions, do I do that with a massive bot network from inside my own country? Maybe, but more likely I want the traffic to look organic, so I want to have it come from all over the world including from inside the US itself. Knocking down a data centre would have no impact on me then. Additionally, I try many approaches simultaneously, hiring actual people to run these accounts and spread my propaganda online.
Additionally, there is no evidence that post counts in these right wing communities has measurably dropped at all.
Right, the article that's been proven wrong dozens of times all over this site. You're parroting something proven to be false, while you weren't even sure it was true. Do you not see how that is worthy of ridicule?
has it? i hadn't seen that. can you send me an example of how it was disproven?
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9y7l0pm8jkko
Got anything better?
aww it’s a baby 6 day old sea lion
Nah had to make a new account. Would love to see some proof of bot traffic going down though, while you're here.
Why'd you have to make a new one, hmm?
I forgot my password and am not giving my email for a recovery, lol
Ok that's reasonable I guess
Yandex is a cloud provider, like Google. They host government workloads, again like Google does. Do you still believe Google only has search engine data centers too, dinosaur?
It is highly likely government workloads were running on the Yandex servers that were struck. That's just how modern compute works. Whole lot of different things running in the same data centers, and government is probably paying the most
The part most people are getting wrong, and that you accidentally got right, is that government workloads would just failover elsewhere
Disinformation campaigns are strategically important for Russia. They would obviously implement disaster recovery plans. They would be down for less than an hour
Do you still need me to provide proof to you that Yandex does cloud compiting? I will just be giving you a passive-aggressive LMGTFY link
If you honestly need me to prove that to you, you understand too little about computing for this discussion to be worthwhile
I know I'm right, you didn't need to tell me. Good work though 👍
oh okay then
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9y7l0pm8jkko
What's this, using an evil imperialist NATO source as support?
BBC would have an evil imperialist NATO incentive to say that the Russian bots DID slow down after the bombing. So them saying that it didn't happen makes this more believable.
It's almost like saying one thing is unbelievable just because of its source is just as bad as saying something is completely believable just because of its source.
I know. MLs frequently don't.
LOL
https://lemmy.world/post/53098671?scrollToComments=true
I've seen that, what are you trying to say?
Tell me about it. You've gotta be able to recognize bias in reporting, which helps in understanding where why and when a mainstream source would lie.
I wouldn't trust the BBC if they say Israel is not doing a genocide, because it's in their best interest for the population to remain friendly with colonizers in the middle east. I do trust them when they say that a strike on their enemy didn't negatively affect bot traffic, because they would fucking love to blow up a Russian data center and kill Russian bot networks.
So someone is forcing them to publish this article? They're gnashing their teeth?
Is that really what you understood from my message? Really?
No, I'm wondering why they'd publish an article so very against their own alleged interests when, allegedly, they usually bend the truth wherever they can and are so very untrustworthy and they could just, idk, say nothing.
Gotta use your words bud. Articulate your opinion and why you believe it, otherwise you'll jist get downvoted to oblivion
I like offering the same amount of proof as the article, lmao.
But seriously check out my other comment in this thread it's got a bbc article about it.
Wow a liberal is praying for the deaths of foreigners? What else is new??
I'm not a bot, you moron.