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Drone strikes didn’t take out a Russian bot farm, but we were primed to believe it
(www.motherjones.com)
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this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2026
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tl;dr the "bots" were web crawlers, not social media accounts. And there's no evidence that disinformation campaigns saw any change at all.
And notably, most of the actual news articles, even from the start, admitted that there wasn't any proof if you actually read the articles. They were all "People are saying there's a drop!" but farther down it was all "There's no evidence it's happening, but people are saying!!!!!"
One European Parliament MP said something, everyone else just went with it, Zelensky then doubled down and apparently that was good enough. It soured me on some publications for sure.
Why did Musk cut Ukraine off from star link over web crawlers?
I think he cut them off because Donny wanted it over Ukraine not wanting to be in on his super cool “deal”.
Timing is sus
Did he? Seems unlikely.
No, there is no evidence and the graphs were just Yandex search crawlers. Yet there are numerous anecdotes about far right accounts getting substantially less amplification and engagement in the aftermath. That could be just a mirage but it could be more than that. That would warrant a proper statistical investigation at some point. After all, the question if Yandex servers host parts of the Russian psyop system is a valid one, that won't be clarified by either misleading graphs, anecdotal stories or stories about how it was absolutely nothing, without offering any evidence for that either. Those big data centres were, from what I have read hardly just doing web crawler stuff.
Yeah I mean just because there's no evidence doesn't mean it's not true, of course. But also there are potentially psychological explanations for this.
We were shown a graph and given a story, you've internalized it and spread it to others. I don't that narrative because the evidence doesn't play it out.
I did not spread it, I did not just believe stuff I still don't see a clear picture of what was effected and if or if not online campaigns of the Russian state were in any way effected or not. They key for answering that would be in depth investigation of engagement and traffic on various autocratic right accounts in the EU, of AfD and Co. We know the timeline after all. Indirect effects are possible of course as well. Existing psyop campaigns can be theoretically also effected by knock on effects due to disruptions in the core online services of the country.
Very possible. They rely on good translations for example, and I would assume Yandex was one of the services that offered this. Or at least it might have run in the same data centers.
Without trustworthy translations, you can hardly influence as easily.
And even if there are alternatives, the existing data pipelines need to be reworked first (new APIs, no contracts, etc)
I haven't done anything except explain the words in the article. If you have evidence, please feel free to share with the class.
https://futurism.com/future-society/elon-musk-engagement-shrivels-destruction-russian-bot-farm
And then Musk cut Ukraine off from Starlink
That's not evidence, that's just another article