I don't use X myself, but my friends told me there's a noticable reduction in hateful tweets, at least in the Polish sphere. Much less comments blaming Ukrainians for everything wrong with the world.
One of the reasons we need to better relate social media companies, is so we can get at this data. Twitter was incredibly open, pre-Musk. If you're running a platform like that, you're a publisher, and should be required to provide API access for accountability and transparency purposes.
I hate Russia with a passion and strongly support Ukraine, but this kind of convenient narrative always makes me suspicious. (I use Twitter daily and haven't necessarily noticed anything.)
Reminds me of when 4channers said 4chan's daily interracial posting went way down on October 7, 2023. (It didn't.)
I could believe this, but not before I see a good empirical analysis. Until then, it just feels like typical folk gossip.
Seconded. The amount of "someone who claims to be on my side has a bad view, must be a bot!" is absurd.
People have been problematic since recorded time, and the whole "well X% of internet traffic is bots!" doesn't mean the % you're interacting with is just that.
99.99% (totally made up for example) of the emails I am probably sent are spam, those are filtered automatically before I even see them by the various email providers, and of the remaining .01% some still slips through.
I feel that there's somewhat of a similar disconnect between "x amount of traffic is bots" and people assuming that means that supposed ally who says horrible things is a bot (...or psyop..or false flag...or etc...)
EDMO published an analysis on the topic[0] of "independent anti-vax influencers" unrelated to Russia, suddenly pushing viewpoints that explicitly benefit Russia in a coordinated manner.
I'm not denying that Russia spreads disinformation and propaganda. They definitely do. I'm just skeptical knocking out these data centers is necessarily creating the effect people are anecdotally claiming to observe.
Either Ukraine was aiming exactly for that or it is just a coincidence and Ukraine is going to exploit it further because reducing Russian bot activity will reduce visibility for parties which are openly hostile to Ukraine (like AfD) which reduces their ability to get into power.
It’s also possible the US and UK gave targeting information or helped Ukraine with site selection. It’s not like we don’t know where this stuff is coming from.
Just this week Trump was threatening to cut off intelligence if Ukraine continued targeting Russian oil refineries. This implies they are still receiving intelligence.
Exactly and also Europe still buys products from Russia. Maybe having high diesel prices is a bigger problem than Russian companies getting a few extra rubbles. It’s a tough situation - what else should be done? You can say Iran but they have to be taken care of too or prices would be even higher.
Maybe, but also, they just hit a few of the largest data centers. Russia simply does not have that many large data centers and it's not so much of a secret where they are located I guess. Such an attack disrupts a lot of things and it's natural that the Russians focus their recovery efforts and the spare capacity they have left elsewhere on more critical services.
With some analysis, it might be possible to figure out which accounts were Russian trolls by comparing tweet frequency with the timing of these bombings.
There's of course the obvious, low effort trolling, but I'd think there are also more subtle, maybe more intellectually equipped information warfare going on.
German here. I wish. AfD polls highest out of all parties, based on several independent polling organizations. [1] It's not plausible that online support evaporates over night.
Curious where it’s being documented - this is a fascinating study (who knows how long time period to measure its impact will last) - do you have links?
I haven't seen this effect documented but if it isn't being documented it really needs to be. We need to get -very- mad about the soft wars being waged right now and the first step is to understand the extent of what is going on and by who. We all know that bots are driving a massive amount of engagement right now. It is rare though to see such direct causal proof of where it is coming from.
You made an account 4 minutes ago just to post this? Of course, it is obvious what they meant. The AfD voters are real voters, but they can still be driven by hate stirred up by (among other things) Russian bots.
By the way, the 40% was in one particular Bundesland (Saksen-Anhalt). In the polling for the national elections they are around 28%:
Does it not bother you it's entirely fact-free? No source, no info what exactly is on Y-Axis and provided data ends in the future at the time of the posting?
Would you mind posting at least one link? If it's actually documented across the internet, this should take you no time. A bunch of anecdotes does not count, though.
Looking at the destruction of Yandex data centers, these days it shows how terrifying drones are as weapons.
I'm curious about how to defend against such drones.
Are kamikaze drones a method of exploding on a target after image learning?
They are nearly useless. Lasers work with the direct line-of-sight, and the most recent iteration drones can fly just a few _meters_ over the terrain. And they can approach from any direction.
So lasers or turrets can work if you want to defend a military base in the middle of a desert, but not something that can be deployed in cities.
Apparently, the most efficient method so far is interceptor drones.
> these days it shows how terrifying drones are as weapons.
They aren't fundamentally different from a hundreds of assholes sitting in an airplane 25,000 feet above you, flying above the ceiling of your flak and air interceptors, dropping a few thousand tons of firebombs on your town.
> I'm curious about how to defend against such drones.
1. Countries who start wars rarely do so from a position of weakness.
2. Drones are more effective in an asymmetric fight. The stronger side, more developed side gets hit harder. Which is why Russia and the US is having such a bad time with them.
Is this sarcasm? You don't see a lack of something. That's what it means. To prove a reduction you have to look at aggregate statistics and sentiment analysis.
Since this submission is kind of on the topic of trolling, I miss good old fashioned forum troll comments like this. non political, not immediately obvious, cortisol provoking (7/10)
Those CF country stats are certifiably useless. They only know the last hop. We know that consumer routers and web browser extensions are vulnerable. There are plenty of ways to bounce malicious traffic through assumed-organic hosts. These are almost impossible to track, especially given the prevalence of CGNAT.
No serious person would ever claim that Russian cyber influence operations were sending traffic directly from Russian IP addresses. That's 'Get Smart' levels of absurdity. It's as ridiculous as a Russian spy pretending to be an American while speaking with a thick Russian accent.
As the other commenter said, not helpful. If you go with cf countries, Germany is one of the worst offenders. But only because it has Frankfurt as a big traffic node and lots of hosting providers.
This graph shows that Yandex Web crawler farm was hit. The other option, it was shut down to accommodate more critical services that got hit. (I worked for Yandex 20 years ago, one crawler guy was in the same room.) Not sure if troll farms got affected in any way, that is a different business entirely, no overlap.
The interesting aspect is this: Yandex was taken from its owners semi-consensually. Similarly, the original owner of the troll farms was blown up in a business jet. He staged a mutiny cause his dirty bloody business was about to be taken from him non-consensually. Some other large non-consensual takeovers unfold for 5 years, soon 6.
>I still don't understand how Prigozhin felt safe after surrendering, so much that he flew his jet near Moscow.
It all feels so farcical to the extent that it feels like it was either staged somehow, or they took enough of his family hostage to leave him no other choice.
Because you can't be that stupid and live to be that high and that old in Putin's regime.
It’s because he was never one of them, the KGB; he was naive and thought he could send a message and show mercy by stopping his advance in exchange for concessions. He should’ve known that above all else, above money or image or power, trust or diplomacy, the one thing that the leader of the siloviki can’t do is to appear weak when challenged directly.
This is a great example of a headline that has two completely different meanings to two different groups.
Many are (incorrectly) interpreting 'bot traffic' to mean something like "fake users on social media that leave comments and 'likes' supporting right-wing posts". (this is something Russian bots were accused of during the 2016 US presidential election)
But Yandex is like Russia's Google. Both Google and Yandex need to scrape the internet in order to index it in their search (no index means the site would not appear in search results).
So Yandex datacenters going down meant so too did their scrapers (i.e. their 'bots' that visit sites to index them). Nothing to do with 'bots' as per the Russia collusion allegations a la the 2016 election.
They could be dead you know. I wouldn't joke around, we're all in the same business after all. I'm sure the SRE's didn't decide who rented space in their DC.
There's a lot of ancedotes "I've seen hatespeech drop" etc. This is measurable and there are people measuring this kind of thing. Let's wait for some real data.
It is a very hard time to do this sort of study with APIs and scraping not being available to the labs that would actually want to study this.
My guess would be that there will be a significant change detected but Russian troll farms are not totally datacenter operated - it's still mostly ran by real office workers like in 1984.
I hope at least fellow IT people can recognize that "social media bots" are not running on Yandex datacenters neither they have IP adresses from Russia.
This is just not how social media botting works. If you try to "bot" facebook, instagram or any major social network via browawe from datacenter IP let alone ones from Russia you'll soon get all your accounts banned.
Social media are botted via apps on mobile phones set in large farms; read: thousands of mobile devices. They either jailbroken or have some advance automation.
Neither they use Russian IP. Instead they go for residential proxies kindly provided by Israeli firms where bandwidth cost a leg, but it worth it. Or they just use their own botnets instead.
Why on earth would they host orchestrating applications in Russia? AWS, Hetzner, DigitalOcesn work just fine.
In Russia it's higher latency, way more expensive and there are lots of connectivity issues. Its not like Russia have ministry of social network botting that require to host it within country.
Reason why these bot networks are effective and hard to find is because it's not some "KGB" minister respobsibility.
Botnets, malware, botting in Russia is someone small criminal enterprises with a lot of people doing it independently. They might be affilated to government or not at all - might be they just sell services to highest bidder.
Latency is irrelevant for social media posting, those bots aren't playing Overwatch. Western VPS providers might identify and suspend your entire operation overnight, leading to what we're seeing here. Not sure where you even got that Russian VPS are more expensive, it's quite the opposite - and anyway, bandwidth wouldn't be the main factor. Finally, the IPs used for residential proxies are American and European, so sorry to be blunt, but with that "Israeli firms" bit you're just parroting nonsense you don't understand for the sake of an argument.
The business case reason Russia would have a central orchestrator in a Russian data center is that they want centralized control. They are unlikely to delegate control of the information sphere to another, or allow a huge random mass of uncoordinated individuals just “post positive stuff about Russia”.
Putin seems to very much like control, and I doubt he would delegate control over foreign propaganda to agents outside Russia.
This is especially true if you want to spread a lie. Lies have to be coordinate, the truth does not.
99% seems like a stretch, especially given that elephant in the room: The United States. Seems like isolating both might be required. If you only isolate Russia you save the undersea fiber optic cables, but fishermen in the pacific still get bombed.
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[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 15.3 ms ] threadReminds me of when 4channers said 4chan's daily interracial posting went way down on October 7, 2023. (It didn't.)
I could believe this, but not before I see a good empirical analysis. Until then, it just feels like typical folk gossip.
People have been problematic since recorded time, and the whole "well X% of internet traffic is bots!" doesn't mean the % you're interacting with is just that.
99.99% (totally made up for example) of the emails I am probably sent are spam, those are filtered automatically before I even see them by the various email providers, and of the remaining .01% some still slips through.
I feel that there's somewhat of a similar disconnect between "x amount of traffic is bots" and people assuming that means that supposed ally who says horrible things is a bot (...or psyop..or false flag...or etc...)
Eg https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328006677_Weaponizi...
This is an easy topic to find empirical analysis.
[0] https://edmo.eu/publications/how-covid-19-conspiracy-theoris...
I mean, sure, maybe some random person at the Pentagon could have done it but the US has not acted as a Ukraine ally for years now.
There's of course the obvious, low effort trolling, but I'd think there are also more subtle, maybe more intellectually equipped information warfare going on.
[1] https://www.dkriesel.com/_media/sonntagsfrage_wahl2025.png
It makes me wonder whether activists should have been targeting these operations sooner. I had no idea they were so centralized.
By the way, the 40% was in one particular Bundesland (Saksen-Anhalt). In the polling for the national elections they are around 28%:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_G...
https://bsky.app/profile/chadbourn.bsky.social/post/3mxmourr...
(and Zdechovsky is not a reliable source at all)
Continue drinking the state media kool-aid, you useful idiot.
Out of curiosity, I just tried Gemini 4 Argon and it seems to have nailed it, decoding even your "illegible" words!
See: https://aistudio.google.com/app/prompts?state=%7B%22ids%22:%...
Something like https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-military-laser-shoots-down-c...
So lasers or turrets can work if you want to defend a military base in the middle of a desert, but not something that can be deployed in cities.
Apparently, the most efficient method so far is interceptor drones.
They aren't fundamentally different from a hundreds of assholes sitting in an airplane 25,000 feet above you, flying above the ceiling of your flak and air interceptors, dropping a few thousand tons of firebombs on your town.
> I'm curious about how to defend against such drones.
That one's pretty easy, don't start wars.
So, your easy answer is incredibly difficult.
2. Drones are more effective in an asymmetric fight. The stronger side, more developed side gets hit harder. Which is why Russia and the US is having such a bad time with them.
So yes, it is in fact a pretty easy answer.
Yandex is just a drop in the ocean bud.
No serious person would ever claim that Russian cyber influence operations were sending traffic directly from Russian IP addresses. That's 'Get Smart' levels of absurdity. It's as ridiculous as a Russian spy pretending to be an American while speaking with a thick Russian accent.
The interesting aspect is this: Yandex was taken from its owners semi-consensually. Similarly, the original owner of the troll farms was blown up in a business jet. He staged a mutiny cause his dirty bloody business was about to be taken from him non-consensually. Some other large non-consensual takeovers unfold for 5 years, soon 6.
What an appetite!
Yevheniy Prigozhin, of Wagner PMC fame lately (and ultimately):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yevgeny_Prigozhin
> Not sure if troll farms got affected in any way, that is a different business entirely, no overlap.
Was a different business. Before the "consensual" takeover.
After the takeover, there's only one business that matters: do what they tell you.
It all feels so farcical to the extent that it feels like it was either staged somehow, or they took enough of his family hostage to leave him no other choice.
Because you can't be that stupid and live to be that high and that old in Putin's regime.
Many are (incorrectly) interpreting 'bot traffic' to mean something like "fake users on social media that leave comments and 'likes' supporting right-wing posts". (this is something Russian bots were accused of during the 2016 US presidential election)
But Yandex is like Russia's Google. Both Google and Yandex need to scrape the internet in order to index it in their search (no index means the site would not appear in search results).
So Yandex datacenters going down meant so too did their scrapers (i.e. their 'bots' that visit sites to index them). Nothing to do with 'bots' as per the Russia collusion allegations a la the 2016 election.
My guess would be that there will be a significant change detected but Russian troll farms are not totally datacenter operated - it's still mostly ran by real office workers like in 1984.
Yes, russia uses both farms and attempts to influence the public opinion, but guess what.
This is just not how social media botting works. If you try to "bot" facebook, instagram or any major social network via browawe from datacenter IP let alone ones from Russia you'll soon get all your accounts banned.
Social media are botted via apps on mobile phones set in large farms; read: thousands of mobile devices. They either jailbroken or have some advance automation.
Neither they use Russian IP. Instead they go for residential proxies kindly provided by Israeli firms where bandwidth cost a leg, but it worth it. Or they just use their own botnets instead.
They don't decide what to post independently. An orchestrating application is hosted somewhere, and that somewhere is Russia.
In Russia it's higher latency, way more expensive and there are lots of connectivity issues. Its not like Russia have ministry of social network botting that require to host it within country.
Reason why these bot networks are effective and hard to find is because it's not some "KGB" minister respobsibility.
Botnets, malware, botting in Russia is someone small criminal enterprises with a lot of people doing it independently. They might be affilated to government or not at all - might be they just sell services to highest bidder.
I'd say you never checked Yandex.Cloud pricing. That's just not true - it's not cheaper.
Putin seems to very much like control, and I doubt he would delegate control over foreign propaganda to agents outside Russia.
This is especially true if you want to spread a lie. Lies have to be coordinate, the truth does not.
You'll also be surprised to observe sudden disappearance of both far right and far left.
¹ assuming this is possible. The goal should be the eradication of russian deep state