cross-posted from: https://aussie.zone/post/37426651
Apparently engagement on that other site's r/conservative dropped by 2/3 when Russian data centers went down due to drone strikes.
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If so, it was coincidence. Forgive the copy/paste as I wrote about this elsewhere:
They did not attack the “shitposting datacenters”. The Russian troll/misinformation farms use western VPNs and pirated residential accounts to blend in. If they used Yandex Cloud, it would be easy for websites to filter them and deny them access.
What stopped is the “bots” that index pages, like how Google indexes pages. The Yandex bots that index pages have gone offline because those are the bots that were running in the Yandex cloud / datacenters.
I don’t know anything about this and I have no idea if OP is based on something real or is purely fantasy, but isn’t it possible that yandex infra is still critical in controlling those spam bots hosted on various western servers and residential zombies?
BBC article: https://archive.ph/kOx0W
Why do you assume these websites would want to stop these trolls who increase traffic and engagement metrics. This isnt the first time internet related problems in Russia have resulted in marked decreases on conservative statements on reddit, fb, and twitter. Probably other sites including lemmy as well.
BBC article: https://archive.ph/kOx0W
I'm sorry, but the disinformation in these topics is so high it's hard to get facts as a professional.
That said, maybe a possibility could also be that what you say is true but the LLM usage from those bots reach back to Yandex as their backend because you'd need to have models somewhere to generate seemingly human responses.
In any case, the lessened bot spam is an indication.
BBC article: https://archive.ph/kOx0W
That is quite substantial.