They even noticed a decrease in Trump support activity on social media.
How amazing would it be if Big Z’s long-term strategy was actually to have Trump lose the midterms so he loses enough power that he can’t continue to influence the Ukranian defence so much.
Kill those data centres and bot farms!!
Election inference through disabling election interference. The most pro democracy one can be, by better enabling democracy.
I know that he won’t win a peace prize, But this man needs some recognition for unmasking the Putin regimes’ Paper Tiger status. He’s out there making life just a little better for the rest of civilized society, and has really raised Ukraines’ international profile. There’s no way that Ukraine is not coming out of this as a real power player on the European stage, NATO admittance or not.
But yeah, drop in the bucket. At least some of these shitty AI bots are gone for awhile. A reprieve is a reprieve.
hopefully it took out half (or some?) of the bots on TF2
Are they sitting in data centers…?
Idk
I mean individual players sit at home and cheat from there. I doubt there is a data center running TF2 bots.
This.
silenced Yandex crawler bots,. indexing for their search engine, not social media bots
Why not both?
I was going to say… Does anyone genuinely believe we’re going to see fewer bots by late October? As though we didn’t have a bumper crop of them run out of American datacenters?
Does anyone seriously believe “the bots are gone, so I shouldn’t accuse anyone on the internet of being a bot anymore”? Or are we going to see the same “Bad Take = Russian NPC” response every time someone with an .ml origin says something that sets a .world local account on tilt?
You tankies don’t need to be called bots, you do that shit all on your own. The fediverse and Lemmy is way to small for russia to give a shit about it. You guys spew tankie shit for free for them.
I’ve seen Russian Propaganda pushed to outlets with single digit reach. It’s like they’re subscribed to Meltwater for niche outlets or something. I wouldn’t put it past them to have a guy or two who exclusively earn their paychecks shitposting here.
Fair enough, I just feel like the tankies here are home grown morons lol
The fediverse and Lemmy is way to small for russia to give a shit about it.
Thats not true
Naa those aren’t bots though, that’s literally tankies doing that shit.
Look at the little tankie brigade down voting anything that they don’t like when you call them out in a instance they don’t control lol
If you’re a propagandist then there’s value in being active in niche social media networks. It makes you a big fish in a small pond, and if the social network for some reason blows up then you’d be one of the early adopters which will give you more influence. For example Ghislaine Macwell was a moderator on Reddit, but apparently also Voat iirc, which is an obscure Reddit clone that never had a big user base
It doesn’t actually make sense for Russia to be running their Digital Propaganda agents from Russian IP addresses unless they’re trying to make it easy for the likes of Meta and Twitter to just block them.
I mean, all you have to do is ponder for a few seconds on - “what would I do if I was a propagandist from an adversary nation trying to covertly influence citizens in other nations?”. The immediate, obvious thing is “I wouldn’t makes it stupidly obvious for the counter-intel people on the other side who owns them by hosting the fucking bots in my own country”.
It makes sense for them to have Command & Control in Russia, but not the actual bots.
Zuck brags that 80% of your friend list will be AI and you think Meta is trying to keep out the bots?
Well if the c&c or individual VPS of the people are down, the bots will run out of tasks eventually no matter where they are hosted from.
It’s as likely the C&C for Russian Government Propaganda ops is in Yandex data centers as it is that NSA personnel are working from Amazon data centers.
Security services don’t base their personnel or their user-facing machines in commercial data-centers.
Right, but they can host the infrastructure these people use to do their jobs, like in the article?
It doesn’t actually make sense for Russia to be running their Digital Propaganda agents from Russian IP addresses
I would expect they are passing that traffic through a shitton of pwned computers around the world.
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 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?
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
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.
I don’t know about that.
Feels like there’s a high risk of the LLM going off script and going against the points they are trying to make.
Just like Trump’s AI site saying the 2020 election was not stolen.
Do you not see that daily? There’s nothing internally consistent or coherent about 3/4 of what bots post, it’s just garbage that sounds plausibly human.
I’m not opposed to blowing up data centers in general, just saying…
Nah you still need datacenter compute for orchestration
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.
I thought their goal was to get Russia to leave their country.
Well… it’s to debilitate the Russian economy until Russians can no longer force-project across the border.
But anyone who believes Yandex was the soft underbelly of Moscow is going to be disappointed. Russian troops aren’t going to leave because a data center got lit up. On the contrary, this becomes further agitation within Russia to spend an increasing amount of domestic wealth and civilian lives flinging firebombs at Ukrainian infrastructure. With the intended goal of debilitating the Ukrainian economy until Ukrainians can no longer force-project over the border.
This is purely a war of attrition. There’s no target either side could hit that would end it, prior to a national political realignment or a wholesale economic collapse. Even if one side managed to dome off Putin or Zelensky, the war would drag on under their immediate successors.
And yet /r/conservative went silent. Just like the last time Russian bot farms were targeted.
I respectfully disagree, more data centers should be destroyed, the Russian one currently should take priority
Distrust what you’re fed by TV and the press, and to think for yourself rather than accepting any official narratives these days.
That’s the claim but where’s the evidence. I’m not going around pretending the enemy is diminished when it’s actually not.
yeah, I would love this to be true but it looks like it’s probably disinformation.
hope someone actually manages to get rid of the bots someday!
0 comments… Checks out
Based on when you posted this, there were comments 3 hours prior?
They’re probably a self censored tankiephobe
I don’t know what that is. I could look it up but I won’t. It sounds like such a stupid term, *cringe
“Thankiephobe”, is this a try at Donald Derangement Syndrome 😂😂🤣😂??!
its like saying fatphobia is a thing.
If even the US’ Cold War anti-communist propaganda station ‘Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’ states the drop is likely due to Yandex’s crawlers, what does that tell you about the credibility of Zelenskyy (having an obvious conflict of interest) and all Western outlets running with it, by extension? The Russian government might not even need bot farms at this stage, because the West keeps undermining their own credibility: with single-sided, unsubstantiated malinformation of half-truths at best. It’s so obvious to me they’re trying to pass off any critical thinker as being a Russian troll, and trying to escalate the proxy-war by attributing “hybrid-war” sabotages to the “aggressor” (that is conveniently in a weakened state because of it). Yes, Russia undeniably invaded Ukraine, but wouldn’t the US do the same to Mexico if it turned communist, following all of South-America?
Ugh. Pathetic.
And your argument as to why?
