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Comment by sznio | Hacker News Reader

I don't use X myself, but my friends told me there's a noticable reduction in hateful tweets, at least in the Polish sphere. Much less comments blaming Ukrainians for everything wrong with the world.

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Either Ukraine was aiming exactly for that or it is just a coincidence and Ukraine is going to exploit it further because reducing Russian bot activity will reduce visibility for parties which are openly hostile to Ukraine (like AfD) which reduces their ability to get into power.

It’s also possible the US and UK gave targeting information or helped Ukraine with site selection. It’s not like we don’t know where this stuff is coming from.

US? Absolutely not

UK? Quite possibly. Given their recent admission (finally) around the Russian propaganda for Brexit

Most of those drones have starlink recivers.

UK has no infra to target even their own missiles. They always had to use US!

Ukrainian drones can't use Starlink in Russia because Musk is not allowing that. So that's false.

US is helping with targeting and a lot of things.

Thanks for the pointer to that Brexit story. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c6jdm3zggl0ko for anyone else who's not seen it.

That doesn’t make sense. The US literally gives targeting intelligence to Ukraine.

US seems unlikely given Trump just made a deal to give money to Russia in exchange for diesel and blamed Ukraine for gas prices.

I mean, sure, maybe some random person at the Pentagon could have done it but the US has not acted as a Ukraine ally for years now.

Just this week Trump was threatening to cut off intelligence if Ukraine continued targeting Russian oil refineries. This implies they are still receiving intelligence.

Exactly and also Europe still buys products from Russia. Maybe having high diesel prices is a bigger problem than Russian companies getting a few extra rubbles. It’s a tough situation - what else should be done? You can say Iran but they have to be taken care of too or prices would be even higher.

Maybe, but also, they just hit a few of the largest data centers. Russia simply does not have that many large data centers and it's not so much of a secret where they are located I guess. Such an attack disrupts a lot of things and it's natural that the Russians focus their recovery efforts and the spare capacity they have left elsewhere on more critical services.

Russia attacked several Ukraine data centres recently. This was just tit for tat.

Same in Germany : AFD's activity went abruptly down apparently.

Can you link a reliable source for this? The only thing I could find online was someone claiming this with a chart that does not refer to Afd at all.

As far as I can tell there is no reliable data that would indicate any of that.

One of the reasons we need to better relate social media companies, is so we can get at this data. Twitter was incredibly open, pre-Musk. If you're running a platform like that, you're a publisher, and should be required to provide API access for accountability and transparency purposes.

With some analysis, it might be possible to figure out which accounts were Russian trolls by comparing tweet frequency with the timing of these bombings.

There's of course the obvious, low effort trolling, but I'd think there are also more subtle, maybe more intellectually equipped information warfare going on.

I hate Russia with a passion and strongly support Ukraine, but this kind of convenient narrative always makes me suspicious. (I use Twitter daily and haven't necessarily noticed anything.)

Reminds me of when 4channers said 4chan's daily interracial posting went way down on October 7, 2023. (It didn't.)

I could believe this, but not before I see a good empirical analysis. Until then, it just feels like typical folk gossip.

Seconded. The amount of "someone who claims to be on my side has a bad view, must be a bot!" is absurd.

People have been problematic since recorded time, and the whole "well X% of internet traffic is bots!" doesn't mean the % you're interacting with is just that.

99.99% (totally made up for example) of the emails I am probably sent are spam, those are filtered automatically before I even see them by the various email providers, and of the remaining .01% some still slips through.

I feel that there's somewhat of a similar disconnect between "x amount of traffic is bots" and people assuming that means that supposed ally who says horrible things is a bot (...or psyop..or false flag...or etc...)

I always assumed that all of those people were correct, everyone they were arguing with is a bot. What I think they overlooked is that everyone they agreeing with is a bot too.

Russia’s use of social media to influence western thought and sow discord is pretty well documented (even in their geopolitical texts).

Eg https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328006677_Weaponizi...

This is an easy topic to find empirical analysis.

No, I know. That doesn't necessarily mean these Yandex data centers being hit affected that yesterday and today, though. For a variety of different possible reasons.

right, so far we have yandex search crawler went offline

yet to see any evidence of anything else going down

Here's basically the most anti-Russia account on Twitter agreeing with you and me: https://x.com/P_Kallioniemi/status/2109542508682248478

Seems to likely just be a standard socially constructed folk belief

All I can say is that vile comments usually there on certain pages dealing with the war in Ukraine have almost all disappeared under some of the FB feeds I read.

Excuse the grammar.

EDMO published an analysis on the topic[0] of "independent anti-vax influencers" unrelated to Russia, suddenly pushing viewpoints that explicitly benefit Russia in a coordinated manner.

[0] https://edmo.eu/publications/how-covid-19-conspiracy-theoris...

I'm not denying that Russia spreads disinformation and propaganda. They definitely do. I'm just skeptical knocking out these data centers is necessarily creating the effect people are anecdotally claiming to observe.

A German friend said support for the AfD completely evaporated. Gone.

German here. I wish. AfD polls highest out of all parties, based on several independent polling organizations. [1] It's not plausible that online support evaporates over night.

[1] https://www.dkriesel.com/_media/sonntagsfrage_wahl2025.png

What about true social?

I've actually seen less controversial comments here on HN as well.

That’s on me. I’ve been commenting less.

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