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Motivated Reasoning and Confirmation Bias Drive Viral Claims of “Russian Bot” Declines (america2.news)
submitted 3 weeks ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 9 points 3 weeks ago (4 children)

This is probably a dumb thing to say:

if we could really trace that much bot traffic to 3-4 big data centers, surely we could have already cut it off by filtering a few addresses?

Now, the obvious counterpoint, what if Russia has some massive distributed private network to disguise where the traffic is coming from?

surely that network is designed so it could handle a couple of nodes (in this case Data Centers) going out without us noticing a drop? Say Russia has 15 DCs, if 4 go out we should still be seeing ~70% of bot traffic

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  • [–] 7 points 3 weeks ago

    if we could really trace that much bot traffic to 3-4 big data centers, surely we could have already cut it off by filtering a few addresses?

    Nope. It is trivial to set up a server to use a lot of IP adresses (think hundreds or thousands), and distribute them anong the bots.

    You can lease IP addresses per month cheaply. Brokers supply you with the right ones so you appear to come from the country you claim if that is important. Usually it isn't, as no one sees the IP except the platform, and they usually don't care (nor should they really)

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  • [–] 7 points 3 weeks ago

    There was a story linked from hackernews yesterday that said Yandex has both a cloud and a search engine. The search engine bots, which are similar to google bots were knocked off line. Some Russian bots used the Yandex cloud and were knocked off line momentarily but quickly switched to other networks. In other words Russia uses redundancy like every other competent tech user...

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  • [–] 3 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

    Of course we could have. But Facebook and other platforms love it because it drives engagement. Bots inflate the user count, and bait posts get users arguing.

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