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.
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”.
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.
The AI-powered bots that were hosted directly on Yandex servers and could not be moved to a different server (or manually replicated) after the strike, those are the ones that certainly went down - but, of course, it’s only a fraction of a highly distributed disinfo structure, and it will eventually rebuild elsewhere.
The servers that Russia would be most affected by in case of a disruption would be those of VKontakte - their local everything app, government paperwork manager and panopticon, VK Max, is of mandatory use in Russia to the detraction of all other messengers, so seeing VK’s servers down would mean massive problems for the government
You’re telling me that a government wouldn’t have other things running on Yandex servers?
Yandex even offers Yandex Cloud for hosting whatever you want.
What was the reason for the recent drop of the European far-right parties’ social media engagement if it were not the Ukrainian strikes?
I suspect that what’s happening here is complicated.
The strike will have taken out some bots because inevitably that’s what the server farms will have been used for, at least partially. So there will have been some drop in traffic, the majority of the right wing traffic will have come from a minority of users so the drop was significant in terms of quantity of posts, even if it wasn’t necessarily significant in terms of absolute numbers of individual accounts. But then also other accounts were less likely to post because they weren’t getting backed up and retweeted as much, because the account that did all that were the bot accounts.
Show me one factual analysis that actually shows a decrease across the board? I’ve not seen one so far.
A lot of social media followers and boosters of right wing persuasion world wide were absent for a short time. A lot of x traffic is bots, that also slowed much to musk’s ire. Not nearly as much as people are joking about, but not nothing.
Sources? The article tries to tell me the contrary.
Here you go.
Did you read the article? It specifically debunks some of those claims.
Your source pretends that all HTTP traffic is caused by bots as in the sense of “manipulative social media bots”. However, Yandex is also a search engine.
One of the posts embedded in your article about the far right AfD in Germany is even directly debunked in the OP article.
Please read the BBC article linked, and possibly provide better sources for your claims, which aren’t based on hearsay or doctored or misinterpreted statistics.
You are accusing me of not reading the article only to come out with further claims you don’t prove yourself. I don’t engage in such a discussion. (And referring to OP: This account is well known in the meantime of spreading pro-China, pro-Russian narratives.)
The article says that the graphs in your link are false. I’m going to trust the BBC over The London Economic. So should you. Until actual evidence comes out that Russain bot activity went down, stop spreading misinformation.
Wish it would take spam calls out
Try try again I guess
Russia’s cloud infrastructure is highly centralized. There are very few, but large and juicy targets to hit that have a profound effect on the country’s ability to function beyond digital force projection. The first wave of Ukrainian strikes against Russian data centers already knocked many services and companies offline.
Ironically, this is a self-own by the Russian government, which mandates Russian companies to use local services instead of foreign ones while at the same time encouraging this centralized infrastructure that they can easily control.
Data sovereignty is a good thing though. Starting wars is probably a bigger issue for a country than trying to keep their services local.
Using that sovereignity for establishing a digital police state is pretty shit even without imperialistic dreams.
To be clear though there’s a difference between data sovereignty and centralizing everything. My is to keep the data of the company I work for safe, secure, not subject to random deletion via virus / exploding drone / whatever.
If I kept all the data in one place in one data center I would be failing at my job. Even if we kept all that data in the same country is the company. Anything can go wrong when you have all your data in one place, the hosting could go out of business, they could pivot to AI, there could be a fire, that could be a cyber attack. You need redundancy.
Haaaa ! Why can’t we have nice things
This did feel like a convenient fiction more than anything else.
