To be clear four days later there is still zero evidence this is true.
Which gives exactly no evidence of a decline in social media bots.
If you actually click the source link in the article, you see that the graph shows the bot traffic from “AS13238 YANDEX — Yandex LLC”, not the internet overall. That caption was conveniently cropped. Also, those bots are very likely not the kind that post on twitter but web crawlers. Yandex is a search engine. Of course destroying its data centers stops the web crawlers running in those data centers from indexing sites.
I have yet to see an actual statistic of the amount political social media posts or active users on social media sites changing in any way.
Edit: claiming that this attack has destroyed the bot farms and giving mislabeled graphs as sources is actively harmful because it leads people to believe that everything that is left must be “real people” when it’s very likely that pretty much all of the bots are still active.
Yandex also offers Cloud Services. Just saying…
It doesn’t matter. People have already made up their minds, facts are irrelevant.
0 comments… Checks out
That’s the claim but where’s the evidence. I’m not going around pretending the enemy is diminished when it’s actually not.
That thread was removed and OP admitted it’s ChatGPT generated slop in the comments.
Could use this source: https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots/ru?dateRange=7d
Like Yandex only is: https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots/as13238?dateRange=7d
But again that’s all traffic not just potential political disinfo bots so this still doesn’t really tell me anything other than Yandex data centers got blown up.
Blowing up data centers will not stop troll farms. Troll traffic is not coming from Yandex.
Some of the claims appear to conflate data centers with Russian “troll farms” such as the Internet Research Agency (IRA), which became well-known following a 2015 expose. The IRA operated out of a St. Petersburg office building, not a datacenter operated by Yandex. Nor does there appear to be any particular reason the IRA would require an inordinate amount of network resources.
That’s one instance of a troll farm from 11 years ago.
Surely nowadays these troll farms are LLM powered instead of human powered and of course need compute power.
Where the humans sit that orchestrate these bot networks is another topic.
Surely
Trust me bro, it’s the vibe
There’s been a spike recently in australia of people paying Indonesians to post right wing content, half the time a company is using AI they’re actually just paying people in the third world pennies for posting
a lot of this stuff is propaganda on behalf of ai companies, ai is scary! Ai is evil! Ai is powerful! lol
Surely nowadays these troll farms are LLM powered instead of human powered and of course need compute power.
Where is the lion’s share of LLM compute located?
Yeah the idea that they would just route their traffic from a regular office network connection is truly stupid.
They will be using data center compute to generate the traffic, but proxy it through residential proxies and other compromised devices that form a botnet.
Central generation with remote access for the trolls, and distributed outbound traffic.
Nah you still need datacenter compute for orchestration
I’m not opposed to blowing up data centers in general, just saying…
I respectfully disagree, more data centers should be destroyed, the Russian one currently should take priority
Blowing up data centers will not stop troll farms
I didn’t think that is their goal. I thought their goal was to get Russia to leave their country.
If malicious bot traffic came-out of Yandex’s data centers, its legitimated traffic would be blocked everywhere and yandex wouldn’t have been able to operate such a successful business. There are hundred’s of services that track illegitimate and dangerous bot traffic, such databases are use to block malicious crawlers, bot nets, spam bots, email spams, phishing websites, websites distributing viruses … Yandex can’t afford to allow such activities from its networks.
Just because Ukraine is the victim it doesn’t mean we should spread fake news propaganda. They failed to produce any tangible evidence, and after many sources started debunking the claims and proving the base material to be AI generated. they brought in Zelensky to give it more credibility. it is disheartening to see such fake news rise at the forefront of social media sites. and be upvoted by the masses that on other occasions were championing the fight against fake news. But as long as it fits their narratives, it is good to pass.
