People are rejoicing about the removal of Russian bots from social media | Hacker News Reader

People are rejoicing about the removal of Russian bots from social media

the-independent.com

36 pointstantalor14 comments

What's crazy is how complicit platforms themselves are in this behavior.

It's not just Russian political bots, but a good chunk of things you see on social platforms are driven entirely by offshore content farms - China, India, Philippines, etc. Not just the content - but the likes, shares, clicks, etc might all be generated in an attempt to "arbitrage" ad networks.

It's not just that platforms know about this, they are financially dependent on it - which makes it really easy for political agents to hide in the mess.

It all boils down to engagement. Which is a euphemism for 'intellectual curiosity'. Or was it the other way around?

The social networks have two customers, the ad buyers and the bot networks.

The bots don’t pay for reach but they juice impressions so everyone’s happy (besides the humans).

For something like X or YouTube, do you think premium membership holds enough weight to be considered a third customer? Or do the numbers just get dwarfed by Ad networks and bots?

Without having the numbers, I have to assume e.g. YouTube premium subscribers are contributing little more than a signal on their ad profile as “someone who’s got $15 to spend blocking ads” — this signal will be used when advertising to you everywhere besides YouTube

This is truly one of the most frustrating things about day to day social media use.

I am of the opinion that no one can even engage in good faith on "social" media anymore because the people that argue the hardest and engage the most with any publicly available opinion are the bots with a directive. It has become exhausting.

Speaking on what you believe feels like an exercise in futility because it's immediately drowned out.

Yesterday during a live stream I watch (that covers the Russian war against Ukraine), it was very noticeable that the comment section was much quieter. Very few antagonistic posts and about a 50% drop in comments.

I hope Ukraine eliminates Yandex entirely and at the same time cuts Russia off from the Internet. Not even the the 50 cent army is as bad.

I hope people are tracking this and we'll get some enlightening reports in a few weeks.

I have so many (two) mixed feelings about this....

1: Yandex is Good for Media freedom. I love Yandex. It's like the only "open" search engine that actively lets you search for pirate content without heavily filtering it.

2: Yandex is/supports the Russian Military. I hate Yandex.

On the one hand, piracy is good, but on the other hand, so is slowing down anybody googling AI upscaled copies of Stargate

BLM has practically evaporated from social media due to this. Really makes you think.

What? Citation needed. I would say that BLM has been in a long tail for years now.

But if you want to claim you were being barraged by BLM up until several days ago but now nothing at all? I'm ... "skeptical".

Surely at least some part of this is confirmation bias?

Part? Russiagate is QAnon for Libs.

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