Let's not draw a conclusion from a single data point. Blow up a few more data centers, observe the results, and again, and again.

Once we have a sufficient amount of peer review and replicable data, then we can determine if a reduction in misinformation bot activity is or is not among the plethora of other benefits of blowing up data centers.

For science!

I think people would be well served to understand some underlying concepts here

1. Modern compute operates like a fungible commodity. You can run your workload on almost any data center, and can generally switch with minimal friction

2. Bot farms and influence campaigns are a high priority for the Russian government

Given these 2 facts, we can make some inferences from what happened. Even with 3 Yandex data centers struck, we would expect any bot farms operating from Yandex to stay alive, or quickly return depending on how failover is implemented

We would expect to see the lowest value compute to be pushed out of the commodity market. Things like crawlers, free services, and time insensitive processes

If bot farms were running in a hit data center, we could expect to see a short drop as they fail over and restart. That's something inly data analytics at Meta, X, Reddit, etc. Could accurately detect

BBC was methodologically flawed here. They're looking only for Yandex activity and IPs. For obvious reasons any bot farms would be egressing through IPs/devices not associated with a data center. Those would not change, just where the computational portion of the bot farm is ran

We probably won't know for sure what was affected for a decade or more, but it is very likely Kremlin compute is run at Yandex data centers, the same as how the US government runs a lot of compute on AWS/GCP/Azure

This has been up for thirty minutes and no one has showed up telling you how zelenski is a war criminal or some nonsense. Maybe he's on to something.

Since a lot of people here (myself included) also misinterpreted the recent news, here are some excerpts for those who haven't read the article.

If I had to guess, I'd say that you don't need a data center to run a social media bot that spits out the same generic inflammatory lines all day.

Claims that Ukrainian strikes on Russian data centres reduced Kremlin-linked bot networks have spread widely online, but experts have told BBC Verify there is no evidence the attacks have significantly reduced them.

Viral social media posts have claimed there has been a significant drop in influence operations in recent days, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky suggesting on Monday there was "less hate, less division and fewer provocations" online because of "fewer bots".

But claims these attacks have affected Russian disinformation operations, including accounts posting supportive messages about groups including the Make American Great Again (MAGA) movement in the US and the far-right AfD party in Germany, appear to have come from a misinterpretation of data produced by tech firm Cloudflare.

Some social media users have been sharing charts of Cloudflare data which show bot activity using Yandex's network has declined.

While bots are commonly associated with fake social media accounts that may post false, divisive and inflammatory content, they are also used to automate tasks like scanning web pages so they appear on search engines.

Cloudflare clarified its data includes all automated internet requests to websites hosted on its network, including bots crawling websites for information.

The company also said the drop off was "not necessarily bot behaviour on social media platforms".

Researchers from dTeam, a US-based group that tracks Moscow-linked influence operations, told BBC Verify there has not been "any traffic change from known Russian accounts and bot clusters on any platform".

They added that if the offices of known groups involved in these operations "were in flames then we would see a change".

Bots linked to pro-Kremlin influence operations like Storm-1516 and Matryoshka - both of which BBC Verify has previously reported on - were still active on social media on Tuesday, evidence shared with BBC Verify by dTeam shows.

Zelensky? He was like one of the last people to say it out loud.

So tired of these propagandistic pieces.

tldr: no, fake bot accounts were not affected, only bots like Yandex search engine crawlers

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines

I think it's possible a lot of Russian bots are still good old fashion people paid low wages spamming us all manually.

I’ve been accused of being a Russian bot countless times, even though I’m just a rando from Spain. I think the whole Russian bot thing is blown out of proportion.

Is Putin right to say he has an agreement with the US to provide diesel fuel when there is a well-known fuel shortage in Russia?

Is Putin right to say he’s ready for a peace agreement as soon as Ukraine announces a cease fire and returns all disputed territory? While completely ignoring the Ukranian civilian death toll, the deliberate bombing of schools and hospitals, and the mass kidnapping of Ukranian children?

Is Netanyahu right to say there is a cease fire with Palestinians even as Israel continues to shoot civilians, bomb hospitals and schools, and seize occupied territory?

Is Trump right to say the murder of Iranian civilians and bombing infrastructure, schools & hospitals was justified due to the lack of a nuclear agreement when HE alone is the moron who cancelled the existing agreement that worked for a lot less money than his war is costing simply because he doesn’t like that the agreement was brokered by President Obama who also received a Nobel Peace prize as a result?

Is Trump right to say Venezuelans welcomed US interference even as protests persist and the country’s economy is in free-fall and elections have been postponed?

Is mainstream media right to largely ignore all of the above and politely look away any time the Epstein files are mentioned, any witnesses release statements, or when other countries have no problem investigating & incarcerating the billionaires involved (Unless he happens to be Prince Andrew)? And somehow forget Trump’s name appears in Epstein’s seized files more times than that of Jesus’ name in the entire bible?

So many big questions to ask, but yeah, let’s endlessly debate how many troll farms Zelensky bombed in Russia.

No shit.

Because who are we going to blame for disinformation if the trolls are gone?

His nonsense are debunked in (the bottom part of) this article

Oh also since that other thread got deleted you might want to repost that other article with the twitter like differences. Although, and I couldn't reply to you due to the thread being nuked, that seemed like weak evidence in my opinion and if true doesn't distinguish between paid clickfarms and state sponsored efforts.

I was under the impression when people said russian bot/troll they meant state sponsored and not cheap European labour hired by domestic politicians to promote BS but I might be mistaken.

Anyway it was interesting and worth discussing, although knowing lemmy the unwashed commentariat will blindly believe that one and blindly disbelieve this one.

idk

Good Post.

Every side in a war puts out silly propaganda. Be the most sceptical of claims you want to believe.

Zelensky's office told BBC Verify the president was "talking about the atmosphere on social media" rather than a fall in bot activity. It added it had seen "reports of fewer provocative and hateful comments" from many social media users.

Fuck arse backpedaling. just admit when you made shit up for the gram.

Whether it was true or not, it was an enormous propaganda win for Ukraine, who made Russia look weak for the moment. It looked like a Ukraine victory, even if it wasn't.

I suspect that the Cloudflare report showing Yandex indexers disappeared off the Internet was misunderstood by several media outlets.

Yes.

https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/politics/reform-figures-see-social-media-engagement-drop-after-strikes-on-russia-data-centres-410517/