you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[+] [S] 18 points 3 weeks ago (12 children)
  • [–] 28 points 3 weeks ago (4 children)

    Why would anyone want to use Twitter still?

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
  • [–] 26 points 3 weeks ago* (1 child)

    I wrote my "independent" government news outlet to say that they should probably distance themselves from fascists.

    They wrote back, saying "right now, our mission is to reach as many as possible, and right now X has many of our followers."

    Cowards.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • [–] 1 point 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

    Unfortunately, with a widespread reach it's a platform bigger than Bluesky or Mastodon; the EFF made itself Bluesky-exclusive, so effectively reducing its reach, but some progressive news outlets like Al-Jazeera still maintains a presence on Twitter and is free to criticize Israeli and American actions.

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 17 points 3 weeks ago (1 child)

    I thought it was well established that bot traffic declined since the yanked data centre stuff.

    Is that not the case?

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • [–] 6 points 3 weeks ago

    The bots that were taken down on the "bot traffic" graph are web crawler bots used to index webpages for the yandex search engine. Propaganda "bots" aren't actually labeled as "bot traffic", for obvious reasons.

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 8 points 3 weeks ago (4 children)
  • [–] 27 points 3 weeks ago* (2 children)

    Yandex is a search engine, it has legitimate crawler bots. So this statistic is not really beneficial to the conversation.

    Also, most likely propaganda bots would be under the radar and not self-declaring as bots.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 6 points 3 weeks ago (1 child)

    Or they're self-declaring as crawler bots for a search engine company.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • [–] 15 points 3 weeks ago

    Unlikely. The "bot" traffic that cloudflare here identifies, is traffic according to the useragent, that is not an actual user + heuristics cloudflare uses to identify bot devices.

    Since ruski propaganda bots would want to act as legitimate users, spreading LLM and/or organically generated word soup, and/or pumping views. They not only have to not be identified as bots, but also to act well enough as a user no captcha and/or cloudflare bot identification catches them.

  • source
  • parent