…or is that just what the bots want you to believe?

I don't know. I work at a cyber security company and the traffic to our site dropped by 58% overnight.

This story, that Cloudflare reported lower identified automated bot and API traffic from the ASN of the destroyed data centres, has been so massively warped it’s insane.

It demonstrates that average people and apparently tech reporters like toms hardware don’t know how the internet works at all.

When residential proxies affect at least a third of US households, you don’t need to route through a data centre that will be flagged as bot traffic. You set up a wire guard config and route to a residential proxy installed on millions of smart TVs, android boxes, smart appliances, desktop computers, and phones.

Seriously, I recently mapped multiple residential proxy networks with over 30 million unique US ips that were just scraping. You can use math to reliably fingerprint these networks, they’re big, with hundreds of millions of IPs involved, and you can rotate them via an API call to clean ones.

Zero of this traffic would be taken down by these strikes. We didn’t even see any perceptible change in internet traffic overall with this.

You know what nobody in the news even mentions or talks about? The fact that multiple big AI "competitors" went offline at the same time a while back...

This entire experience has soured me a bit on Lemmy. There were a flurry of excited posts about the massive drop that totally happened. Every article I read refrained from presenting any evidence, and all used waffling text that sounded like it was all coming from other sources that didn't have any proof. It didn't help that Zalenskyy seemed to explicitly say that there was a massive drop - and that sucks, because I tend to generally believe what Ukraine says. I know they're in wartime and every government lies to some degree, but they generally seemed to be truthful for the most part.

So when I tried pointing this out in places, I got massive pushback - "No no, there's totally been a massive drop!" Where? Where's the drop? Where's the numbers from someone doing actual measurements? No answers, just downvotes.

I see this time and time again - often where it's probably less important, like people misread things and decide it means one thing when it doesn't mean that thing - and usually, the thing is bad, so the fact that they completely misread it is probably not so bad, except that it means nobody is caring about the truth.

For example, the Vance couch thing bothers me. There's plenty to string fascists up from trees for, but that couch thing was a joke in a book. So of all the legitimate things we can hate him for and joke about, that is a lie - a lie when it was taken as truth; originally a joke that became a lie when it was taken as truth.

We really don't need to come up with bullshit to be angry. All it does is makes us susceptible to more lies. How much of what I believe is a lie? How much is just flatly incorrect because people keep repeating it as true and I've also fallen for it? I'm not immune.

It's a serious problem everywhere, but Lemmy is small enough and generally progressive enough that it stands out because I EXPECT that fascists to lie. I would expect better from us. (And we aren't as bad, but the amount of misinformation that is vibe-upvoted is insane)

edit: The only thing that makes me happy is that this article is getting upvotes, so there is some hope, at least.

I was arguing this point during the initial wave of suppositions by people just repeating vibes.

I feel like this really shows a certain flavor of social media bullshit very clearly.

tl;dr the "bots" were web crawlers, not social media accounts. And there's no evidence that disinformation campaigns saw any change at all.

The empirical data shows a big decline in Russian bot activity overall. You see it on Twitter already. The strikes took down web crawlers and we saw that graph go down, but the spin of it was all just crawlers falls short of actually explaining a lot of what we're seeing now. The 'Amazon' of Russia, probably didn't keep any kind-of graph to show how their social media twitter bots are running public facing. Now the lie that it was all web crawlers has done it's lap, and we're all going to argue about this a little while longer.

The second problem, however, was that the ultra-specific claims about less activity in certain areas—MAGA, pro-Kremlin bot accounts, and AfD—had absolutely no basis in fact.

“We see no “dramatic drop” in traffic of Kremlin-aligned human trolls-for-hire targeting Russian domestic users (which we have been tracking for years),” wrote Antibot4Navalny, a group of anonymous researchers who track and respond to Russian disinformation.

Emphasis added.

"The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command." — George Orwell.

We still talking about this?

“Many users have reported seeing fewer pro-Kremlin posts and replies since the strikes, and some automated pro-Russian and pro-MAGA accounts have reportedly gone silent. But this could simply be a coincidence.”

So except for the evidence, there cannot be any evidence, thus there is no evidence. Got it!

Goes and checks two hundred (and twelve) accounts (edit: except somehow not those mentioned in the above paragraph that are already known to have gone silent), doesn't see the evidence there, so makes sweeping claim that there is nothing at all across the entire internet that can be different. Makes sense to somebody, I suppose! (Edit: also somehow manages to miss the obvious conclusion that blown-up data centers won't spout out less disinformation, but instead it is remotely possible that they will rather spout out none - so looking exclusively for a decrease in the amount of output, without allowing a complete halt to be counted would be ludicrously stupid in the extreme, if that is what was done.)

Why did I bother reading this again? More to the point, why was it written? "We looked for two minutes and didn't learn anything" does not seem to warrant an entire article... Also, why was this post shared here, wasting my time and attention?

Highly ironically, this OP manages to prove its original claim despite all the wild claims based on the slimmest of (lack of) evidence: that you cannot trust everything that you read on the Internet. Have some skepticism, folks!