Ukraine strikes didn't blow up Russian disinformation on social

machinesociety.ai

9 points·mikelgan··6 comments

The tracking itself seems to matter less than checking in at regular intervals. A two-minute weekly review beats a perfect system you abandon after a month.

> Russian disinformation influence operations don’t run through Yandex. Instead, they mostly use residential proxies, compromised IoT devices, commercial VPNs and Western cloud hosting.

Can the author of this article perhaps substantiate this claim with a source? Lots of professionals are studying Russian disinfo in the western spheres, I'd be curious to see if any of them concur.

> Second, there is no link between bot traffic and Russian disinformation. The Cloudflare data being held up as bot traffic is mainly search engine crawlers harvesting data.

Two things can be true, Cloudflare's graph can be mostly search engine crawlers, and other traffic could be affected.

There is no reason why social media bots would be in a single Yandex datacenter. They would be easy to ban. Either decentralise for small VPSs around the world. Or use infected fridges.

It is probably easier to centralize the command and control infrastructure and AI comment generation in a few places and use proxies for posting. The bots are not independently operating, they are puppets.

The bots may still depend on resources provided by Yandex, eg by using their AI services to compose messages. API goes down, bots fail to generate text, botspam disappears.

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