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this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2026
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I was going to say... Does anyone genuinely believe we're going to see fewer bots by late October? As though we didn't have a bumper crop of them run out of American datacenters?
Does anyone seriously believe "the bots are gone, so I shouldn't accuse anyone on the internet of being a bot anymore"? Or are we going to see the same "Bad Take = Russian NPC" response every time someone with an .ml origin says something that sets a .world local account on tilt?
It doesn't actually make sense for Russia to be running their Digital Propaganda agents from Russian IP addresses unless they're trying to make it easy for the likes of Meta and Twitter to just block them.
I mean, all you have to do is ponder for a few seconds on - "what would I do if I was a propagandist from an adversary nation trying to covertly influence citizens in other nations?". The immediate, obvious thing is "I wouldn't makes it stupidly obvious for the counter-intel people on the other side who owns them by hosting the fucking bots in my own country".
It makes sense for them to have Command & Control in Russia, but not the actual bots.
Zuck brags that 80% of your friend list will be AI and you think Meta is trying to keep out the bots?
That is a good point.
It really depends if he's trying to control the narrative (in which case he will want to control the bots) or to just keep people engaged with his products (in which case he doesn't care).
I think it depends. It is more about pushing the desired information to the desired profiles.
Any narrative can be useful to push as long as it is the right type of person to be pushing it to.
I believe why so many Billie's have gone mask off is because they have had such tremendous success with the granular controls algorithms provide for propaganda, radicalisation and disinformation.
Meta almost certainly is trying to keep out bots, so that they can fill your feed with their bots instead.
Why would Meta or Twitter block them?
I would expect they are passing that traffic through a shitton of pwned computers around the world.
Well if the c&c or individual VPS of the people are down, the bots will run out of tasks eventually no matter where they are hosted from.
It's as likely the C&C for Russian Government Propaganda ops is in Yandex data centers as it is that NSA personnel are working from Amazon data centers.
https://www.nextgov.com/modernization/2024/09/nsas-secret-amazon-developed-cloud-environment-progressing-very-well/399611/
The NSA is using AWS?
Security services don't base their personnel or their user-facing machines in commercial data-centers.
Right, but they can host the infrastructure these people use to do their jobs, like in the article?
I doubt the story of the bots disappearing, but Yandex a) has specifically given control to Russian government, by providing a super-share that doesn't pay dividends but gives the deciding vote, to Sberbank (this kind of share shenanigans are possible under Netherlands' law, where Yandex is incorporated for this very reason); and b) does provide cloud-hosting services the same way as Amazon does. Yandex is generally considered to basically be a government corporation by now, it's one of like three candidates whenever the government decides to introduce some ‘sovereign’ service like Russian analogue of YouTube.
Arkady Volozh, the surviving cofounder of Yandex, has left Russia over disagreements about the war and the government's control, taking for himself some side business that Yandex was doing abroad, either drones or self-driving cars or something like that. And relocated some 1000 Yandex employees that decided to leave with him.
I just assumed it was all the VPSs and it only would be 1 day before they fixed the routing. Those DC were only being used as infrastructure for routing traffic out of Russia.
You tankies don't need to be called bots, you do that shit all on your own. The fediverse and Lemmy is way to small for russia to give a shit about it. You guys spew tankie shit for free for them.
Thats not true
https://lemmy.world/post/52970113
Naa those aren't bots though, that's literally tankies doing that shit.
Look at the little tankie brigade down voting anything that they don't like when you call them out in a instance they don't control lol
I've seen Russian Propaganda pushed to outlets with single digit reach. It's like they're subscribed to Meltwater for niche outlets or something. I wouldn't put it past them to have a guy or two who exclusively earn their paychecks shitposting here.
Fair enough, I just feel like the tankies here are home grown morons lol
Everyone here is a home grown moron. We're all just one schizophrenic meth head typing into a word doc.
If you’re a propagandist then there’s value in being active in niche social media networks. It makes you a big fish in a small pond, and if the social network for some reason blows up then you’d be one of the early adopters which will give you more influence. For example Ghislaine Macwell was a moderator on Reddit, but apparently also Voat iirc, which is an obscure Reddit clone that never had a big user base