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Comment by onlyrealcuzzo | Hacker News Reader

Does Cloudflare have much if anything to do with X/Twitter and Facebook/Instagram and TikTok, or even Reddit?

Presumably these bots make up a very small percentage of traffic in comparison to how much they make up in terms of comments.

And I doubt they have visibility on the most popular social networks.

The reason these bots are able to succeed is because the average person comments and votes so little that there's huge volatility between a power user and an average user. Power users are also not that rare, so it's hard to determine who's a power user and who's a bot (though most power users probably are bots).

You can make up a significant portion of comments and votes (especially on a topic) with a VERY small amount of the total viewing traffic.

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The biggest tell is that both Russia and the US panicked and immediately tried to prevent further attacks.

This is the first action that has had that effect. Taking out refineries for month after month produced grumbling. Taking out data centres produced an immediate response.

If the data centres didn't matter, Russia and the Trump people would have shrugged and said "Cute..." and/or repeated their standard rhetoric.

Right? This is what prompted musk to take down Starlink, after everything else?

Look at what they do, not what they say.

I'm not sure I see the connection. Ukraine doesn't need Starlink up in order to be able to hit Russian data centers.

You mean Trump and star shield, right ?

The two networks are quite different despite SpaceX initially doing the MVP work for it.

They use both, heavily. An outage, like the one recently, severely affects them.

> In October 2026, George Barros of the Institute for the Study of War said the network had become "the backbone of military communications in Ukraine", used by land, naval and air forces, with both Starlink and Starshield (the US DOD service) used depending on the application.[60]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink_in_the_Russo-Ukrainia...

Yeah weird thing to purport that feels extremely misleading. Suppose one way to find out is to look at accounts that were suspected of high bot activity and see if they got the same amount of engagement as the weeks before the strikes.

I don't really trust Cloudflare to be a good steward when discussing this since they have a sordid history in protecting hate.

>Yeah weird thing to purport that feels extremely misleading. Suppose one way to find out is to look at accounts that were suspected of high bot activity and see if they got the same amount of engagement as the weeks before the strikes.

But nobody did that. All we have is a bunch of people on twitter/reddit passing around the same pixelated screenshot from cloudflare, using it to claim that russian bots have been stopped in their tracks.

> But nobody did that.

That's quite the militantly ignorant statement.

https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/politics/reform-figures-se...

It seems like they are saying "posts that were posted recently have less views than posts posted before the Yandex strike" which is explained just by time. Did they adjust for the time the posts spent online?

> It seems like they are saying "posts that were posted recently have less views than posts posted before the Yandex strike" which is explained just by time.

It doesn't seem you even bothered to read the article. It shows quite clearly that following the strike post from populist far-right figures had literally a residual level of engagement, which includes both views, comments, reposts, likes, etc.

The screenshots clearly show posts preceding the strike showing literally an order of magnitude more comments, reposts, etc.

I'm not personally tracking there metrics, but I'd expect engagement to normalize a few days after the strike as Russia's propaganda arm is expected to scramble to get it's operation back online. Therefore, "just by time" can accommodate for Russia getting their botfarms back online. But the snapshot covered by this article alone are clear and obvious.

I read the article and that's why i wrote my comment.

For Tice they show a post with 10k views from october 12 and post with 20k views from october 8. There is also post from october 9 which obviously went viral and has hundreds of thousands views, but that's not itself proof because there's a always variability from the algorithm.

Reshare counts are more interesting, 700 for each of oct 8-9 posts but 50 for each of oct 12 posts, that is less likely if we are talking about just the network effects.

anyway we all know russian bots exist. They basically got trump elected after dorsey sold to musk and musk let them run amok. But this is not hard statistics. if they fixed a time period (like, in 3 days posts used to get N engagement avg, now in 3 days posts get M engagement avg) then it could be actual statistics. and they really need to stress reshare counts.

Ah so exactly what you expect, not shocking.

They also have a virtuous history protecting love.

That's like saying Google protects hate because people who hate you use Google.

When you are colorblind you end up helping everyone even people that hate you.

X is under Cloudflare (and according to some of my probes may even use some parts of CF stack)

you're hopeless. if cloudflare could detect these bots, there wouldn't be bots.

being able to detect a forest fire doesn't mean we no longer have forest fires

what do you mean? that's literary what detecting a bot does! stop making excuses and believing cloudflare marketing

Detection is not itself a remedy, detection is a signal

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