We’re discovering that a lot of “personal opinions” around controversial topics disappear when Yandex data centers go dark. Weird!
X traffic went down from the bots, reddit conservative subs, basically vanished overnight, until russia reorients thier bots from somewhere else.
This one sparks joy
That is a gift to humanity
Why would the Russian equivalent of Google be housing people in their data centers to post “controversial opinions”? This is affecting web crawler traffic. Are you unable to post your opinions when a Google data center goes down?
this isn’t about people. this is about a drastic reduction in bots posting. and so we’re clear, the disinformation mechanisms are also running botfarms on google hardware, too, just of a different flavor
Do you have any stats or is this ‘trust me bro’?
i wanna make sure it’s clear that i don’t know if this is true. it’s just that this is the context under discussion. the differences i have noticed have mostly been on corporate social media. fewer overt fascist takes and more honeypot sex bots is what i’ve noticed. but this could be for a litany of reasons
Thanks for clarifying, I’ve seen a lot of people saying that about fediverse comments without any evidence but I could believe there’s a measurable difference on corporate social media just because it’s a lower hanging fruit
there’s some impact on the threadiverse, i’m sure, but i’d wager that the MAIN impact is the impact corporate/fediverse users bring into the threadiverse because that’s the point of influence campaigns: to influence what people feel and think away from the campaign targets
I wonder if Reddit is actually tolerable at the moment
^looks like Yandex is back on the menu, boys
There are a lot of committed liberals who really need dissenting opinions to be Russian propaganda, rather than their fellow citizens who genuinely find the policies and politicians they support to be morally abhorrent, lest they have to reevaluate their own views. Probably a major part of why “Russian shill” is one of the most common insults I see bandied about here, after calling anything and everything AI slop if it happens to seem at all remarkable to them. To be fair, I’m no fan of either AI or Putin, but I think demonstrated instances of Russian political interference in the politics of the US and other nations has served as something of a lifeline to a fair number of centrists, allowing them to avoid the cognitive dissonance of realizing their world view has genuinely become incredibly unpopular with the average person.
Keep it coming! This benefits everyone!
Anyway
