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.
To be fair, it’s too recent for us to have any robust data and analysis over it, but anecdotal and loosely backed claims do suggest a moderately reduced activity overall on contrarian accounts on popular platforms. The minority populists, depending on the country whether they are far right or some left wing niche.
I don’t believe the actual computational shape of a yandex data center would be right or efficient for bot farms, but i do think any external bot farms would use yandex’s indices and the currently trending hype word, “crawlers”, and all that, actual data center shaped work and resource, to carry out their work. The impact, if it’s real and not just imagined which is also entirely possible, would be the lack of resources for the bot farms to find the content to interact with and be efficient with the opinion shaping. That wouldn’t outright stop their work, just make it less efficient and convenient, which would make it slower and more laborious, which, if the anecdotes and such are right, would indeed show up as slightly decreased activity, not a full stop for the activity.
But right now it all depends on the anecdotes or the still fresh and dubious data claims, so it might just be there’s no real impact anywhere. But if there was an impact indeed, this would explain it. Nobody runs any sort of content mills manually, it’s all automated over something. Yandex indices seem entirely plausible as one part of that, and perhaps rented shared computational capacity to some extent too. And whatever else they might be using.
To be fair, I feel like either way it’s all blown out of proportions. The impact is definitely real, there’s real loss of compute and capacity, but I can’t see the bot farms and content mills being a primary symptom or anywhere close. Smells like populist and opportunistic media just doing their thing under capitalism and also the very same concept of opinion shaping on the “western” side of the conflict to me.
It is all anecdotes that can be explained by just a placebo effect. Actual bot farms (the kind of bots we’re talking about) don’t exist on search engine data centres. They’re set up in poor countries running on multiple second hand devices using proxies. Bots do exist, but you don’t get rid of them by blowing up a data centres used by a privately owned search engine.
That’s all normally the case, but we already saw evidence from leaked documents that people in the Russian government have paid for misinformation campaigns to influence elections, out of state funds. That’s a pretty significant ethical line to cross.
Running a sanctioned bot farm out of a data center that shouldn’t have one - wouldn’t be that much of a stretch, from what we already have evidence has been happening in recent years.
But in principle, I agree with you. It’s unlikely.
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.
I like how Musk’s Star Link cut off their service in retaliation over… Web crawlers?
Or diesel prices before the midterm elections.
How is it a lie? Do we have actual evidence that Russian bots went down?
We have only russia’s word on what was in that data center.
So you believe things are true, not when there’s evidence for it, but because Russia says otherwise?
To be fair, it’s too recent for us to have any robust data and analysis over it, but anecdotal and loosely backed claims do suggest a moderately reduced activity overall on contrarian accounts on popular platforms. The minority populists, depending on the country whether they are far right or some left wing niche.
I don’t believe the actual computational shape of a yandex data center would be right or efficient for bot farms, but i do think any external bot farms would use yandex’s indices and the currently trending hype word, “crawlers”, and all that, actual data center shaped work and resource, to carry out their work. The impact, if it’s real and not just imagined which is also entirely possible, would be the lack of resources for the bot farms to find the content to interact with and be efficient with the opinion shaping. That wouldn’t outright stop their work, just make it less efficient and convenient, which would make it slower and more laborious, which, if the anecdotes and such are right, would indeed show up as slightly decreased activity, not a full stop for the activity.
But right now it all depends on the anecdotes or the still fresh and dubious data claims, so it might just be there’s no real impact anywhere. But if there was an impact indeed, this would explain it. Nobody runs any sort of content mills manually, it’s all automated over something. Yandex indices seem entirely plausible as one part of that, and perhaps rented shared computational capacity to some extent too. And whatever else they might be using.
To be fair, I feel like either way it’s all blown out of proportions. The impact is definitely real, there’s real loss of compute and capacity, but I can’t see the bot farms and content mills being a primary symptom or anywhere close. Smells like populist and opportunistic media just doing their thing under capitalism and also the very same concept of opinion shaping on the “western” side of the conflict to me.
It is all anecdotes that can be explained by just a placebo effect. Actual bot farms (the kind of bots we’re talking about) don’t exist on search engine data centres. They’re set up in poor countries running on multiple second hand devices using proxies. Bots do exist, but you don’t get rid of them by blowing up a data centres used by a privately owned search engine.
That’s all normally the case, but we already saw evidence from leaked documents that people in the Russian government have paid for misinformation campaigns to influence elections, out of state funds. That’s a pretty significant ethical line to cross.
Running a sanctioned bot farm out of a data center that shouldn’t have one - wouldn’t be that much of a stretch, from what we already have evidence has been happening in recent years.
But in principle, I agree with you. It’s unlikely.
Not even just leaked documents. The geriatric cyberpedo released the proof himself.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/trump-accidentally-proves-putin-helped-him-win-and-sabotaged-biden/ar-AA288QJR