Despite multiple Ukrainian strikes hitting Yandex servers in Russia, a thread by antibot4navalny, which has long tracked state-sponsored social media campaigns and troll farms, explains that the Cloudflare “Bot Traffic” chart many people have cited is really about automated web crawlers operated by Yandex accessing the web. It’s not connected to “bots” posting on social media, and Russian bot/crawler traffic overall continues to be about the same as normal. Still, are you noticing any difference in the posts and comments you’ve seen online? [Media: https://bsky.app/profile/antibot4navalny.bsky.social/post/3mxmv7t6nxc27]
  • Tattorack@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    5 hours ago

    You know, I don’t believe there are so many Russian bots astroturfing the Internet. There are plenty of regular humans who truly believe Russia is doing nothing but defend itself, in “aggressive NATO expansion”, and a whole generally anti-West attitude.

    They hate America for being an imperialist power, which… Yeah. Absolutely. But then in the same breath state Russia isn’t, and that they’re nothing more than a victim of said Imperialism.

    Consider this an anecdote, but I have family who says these things. Bots need not apply.

  • belochka@lemmy.worldEnglish
    12·
    14 hours ago

    And it makes perfect sense that before reading this many people felt that they clearly see Russian bots vanishing.

    Human psychology is just not equipped for open Web. Especially social media kind of it. F2F and personal webpages and circles of friends are fine, but anything crowd-related is worse than sending pigeons.