Apparently engagement on that other site’s r/conservative dropped by 2/3 when Russian data centers went down due to drone strikes.
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I bet those guys on the left are pissed off. They all agreed they were all going to wear the little black hat but then fucking Chad turned up with his big white hat like a dick.
How about we start blocking Yandex ASN?
There’s a conspicuous number of comments on this post eager to affirm correlation is not causation.
At first I thought the meme was referring to all the people I severed ties with, because to them, torture, genocide and college rape are controversial and require nuance.
torture and genocide are controversial, but this is about Russian datacenters getting bombed.
You know what, I have been working in Social listening (analysis of social media) for the last 8 or so years and since morning I have been seeing this claim about Russian data centers and activity on r/Conservative, and it has been smelling of propaganda and annoying me all day.
It’s almost 1 am in the morning and I just realised I have the tools to prove or disprove this. So I got up and in 5 minutes I was able get the data.
Americans are really getting real good at propaganda for sure.
Lmao for some reason I am not able to login to my lemmy.world account anymore. This is hilarious.
Lemmy.world was just down. Nvm
Well, duh. Even humans aren’t allowed to post on Reddit anymore, sure do wonder how a bot would get in…
There seems to be a big difference on Twitter tho: https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/politics/reform-figures-see-social-media-engagement-drop-after-strikes-on-russia-data-centres-410517/
Account of Reform’s Richard Tice, which has 400k followers and who normally has 100k+views on their posts and thousands of likes and comments now struggles to reach above 35k views and even 100 comments and retweets.
Nigel Farage himself with his 2.3m followers has also lost a lot of “engagement”, with his content normally reaching hundreds of thousands of views, and now he’s struggling to hit 100k and gets only a fraction of the normal amount of comments and likes.
Edit: I hypothesize that reddit bots are less hosted on Yandex and more on other (western) infrastructure, while Twitter bots seem to come mainly from Yandex.
There could be multiple reasons for this.
- The bots are used only for generating engagement and not posting. So engagements went down, posts didn’t.
- The bots are used on Twitter and not on Reddit so twitter was impacted but reddit wasn’t. Kinda likely considering twitter loves bots and reddit has been cracking down on them.
- Engagement is not a very transparent metric, and depends on a lot of factors like when content is posted, the quality of the content, seasknality, etc. There can be multiple things affecting engagement.
I also heard that on Threads there is now a strange silence around anything “culture wars”-related btw, while Facebook doesn’t seem to be fazed at all. So the Yandex infrastructure seems to have been the staging area for specific platforms, while others are being manipulated from other sites.
I have yet to see credible evidence that any kind of social media activity went down in the last 2-3 days. To me this seems like journalists and politicians capitalising on what people want to hear.
The Twitter numbers seem pretty solid for me - most engagement numbers are achieved in the first 24 hours of posting content on twitter (there are outliers, but it’s a valid assumption). The next weeks will tell how much this perceived drop is really from Yandex going down.
what’s up with your data from 14-18 of august?
Because it’s a quick search and not a dedicated query, I guess the historical data collection is stopping at 56 days instead of going all the way to 60. Same thing happens when I look at any other sub.
I’ll be the idiot who admits to being an idiot. What does this graph mean? Is that just raw mentions of “r/conservative” across the internet as grouped by day? Is it meaningful to see spikes alternating with dips? If what the meme is saying were true, what would this graph look like and why? I’m far from an expert in this and I’m curious.
It’s not mentions of r/conservative, it’s mentions (posts and comments) in the subreddit.
I don’t really see how mentions of the subreddit is meaningful of how many bots there were. There are so many posts about r/conservative being down from other subreddits that I can’t see the correlation
Same, which is why I’m assuming that I’m misinterpreting what I’m looking at. My interpretation doesn’t make any sense, but for somebody who’s never looked at whatever that is, that’s what it looks like it’s saying? It’s probably obvious to people who look at that shit every day, but I’m not sure if the “mentions” are correlating to what’s in the search bar looking thing or what. Or maybe “mentions” is jargon with a different meaning? Idk.
That must be why they’re all targeting the Gears E Day servers. You know, because the game where you chainsaw people in half is woke now. Imagine if grindr went down. They’d be out of all friends.
Having pride flags in a game is woke I’m not sure why the level of violence in game would change that. Whether or not that’s a bad thing is another discussion.
And anyone who even gives a single fuck about that isn’t worth listening to. Nor is their opinion on anything worth any weight. They can go back to COD if it bothers them that much. Calling everyone else snowflakes while they do it lmao
It seems that outside r/asktrumpsupporters, most of the subreddits that tanked were either location-based or extremely general. the post also has a link to the code tho which I didn’t run (I’m on mobile).
I skimmed this article, but I don’t see one mention of r/conservative, or frankly, any subreddit in general. I’ll give it a closer read in an hour if I can (at the gym, got an assignment to do later) but I’m not confident this addresses the specific claim the post is making.
The news article is specifically about bot traffic from yandex being down. The graph doesn’t really have an explicit correlation with the subreddit though, until someone brings up stats on the subreddit itself (which if I remember Reddit removed access to). So you can only really infer based on actually going to the subreddit. Could be correlated, could be not.
From some of these comments, it looks like 2/3 of this community has lost its sense of humor.
(This is also a joke. Bring on the downvotes!)
Nyet comrade, we have exactly as much humor as our dear leader has ordered us to have.
they will what me? tneoo shill ndig meh? i hate mixing alphabets
The Putin/monkey hybrid looks a lot like King Charles.
Are you trying to say all Gauls look alike? That’s racist!
I scared of words I press down button
Where’s the proof? I never see anything that is actual proof with these posts about Yandex.
At best what I see is it’s a cluster of search crawlers that went slightly down.
The endless reposts of memes about it feel like bot behavior, more than anything else
Yeah there for awhile there were 2 variants of the exact same meme template about this that were the top 1 and 2 posts in my “All” tab. Was kinda weird.
It’s pretty fucking annoying how pervasive this as of yet completely unverified story is.
I’m not surprised. It feeds into the idea so many people like to think that everyone who disagrees with them is just a bot. But hate to be the bearer of bad news here: Trump is the President. Bots don’t vote. Somebody was out there voting for that asshole, and I’m sure plenty of them own a computer.
100%
Why are you asking for facts? You’re on the internet here buddy, that’s not going to score you any points.
I was told there’d be no fact checking
And ice cream.
Okay I don’t feel like searching out articles for your lazy ass but:
Fact 1) Russia has been involved in cyber influencing for years. They largely do this through opinion bots.
Fact 2) Russia was severely limited on internet capabilities with recent strikes.
Fact 3) An absolute butt ton of outspoken conservatives and tankies and shit are all of a sudden “gone”.
Could be a false correlation, but even us laymen can guess R=~0.93
Yeah but I’m not seeing evidence that those bots are gone tho. I saw some graph claiming a dip in Yandex web crawlers. That’s it. And even that, the sourcing of it all comes back to one MP for the European Parliament? Like that’s the whole source? Are we really believing those douchebags?
Are we really believing those douchebags?
No, “we” are not.
We’re seeing a mass placebo effect in real time.
Have you seen the state of everything? I’ll take some placebo right now.
I’ll sell you some placebo for three moneys
Three whole money? In this economy?
Still, to have your own placebo!
I’ll take some placebo right now.
I really liked their song off the Cruel Intentions soundtrack
A friend in need is a friend indeed. A friend with weed is better.
MAGA’s trending new drink for Christmas?
Borscht broth & Vodka.
That’s what shchi said.
I’d love to see some site traffic charts during each of the strikes, it would be interesting to see how much of the internets more inflammatory sites are being propped up by IRA bots.
I wanna see the lemmy.ml numbers
Based on what I have seen and the people I have engaged with on ML I think most of them on here are just completely brainwashed by Chinese and Russian propaganda. But I’m sure there are bots or Russian trolls as well.
IRA?
Ireland Republican Army, those mfers won’t quit until everyone celebrate St Patrick’s Day.
Or this is a typo.
Fun fact: in the UK, you can’t legally say the IRA are the good guys for opposing British colonialism, because they’re “terrorists”, but you can join the Orange Order, whom hold a celebration every year celebrating the time they burnt down a house with 3 children inside.
The UK might be the only country worse than the US
Each country has things it is worse at, and America does have some redeeming features.
I have never been to the UK so I won’t make any statements on whether it has any redeeming features.
Not a typo, just a shared acronym.
Internet Research Agency or Glavset. They are Russias primary troll farm
Weird their acronym is in english. I have no doubt it exists, but the layer of propagandization it passed through that we’re using an acronym made up by english speakers feels distasteful.
I had a middle school teacher who would be intentionally deceptive, using terms nobody used to make things sound scary and painting half pictures about cigarettes, drugs, sex, whatever. Even though the overall viewpoint “smoking bad” was correct, the constant obvious bending of the truth did not help her cause.
АИИ
happy now?
Their actual name is written in Cyrillic, which you can’t type with a standard QWERTY keyboard. So yeah, English speakers just use the acronym for the translated IRA instead.
Also most English speakers can’t read Cyrillic, even myself. I can read Runes and sound out the Hellenic alphabet but once ya get to shit like Cyrillic and Georgian I’m lost.
deleted by creator
Most subtle .ml propagandist.
A shockingly large amount of countries use English abbreviations officially
When you include second and third languages, it’s the most spoken language in the world. It’s not that surprising.
Okay? I just didn’t feel like typing the full name out.
Presumably the actual name is something in Russian and “internet research agency” was invented by a journalist to sound scarier than whatever the Russians call it.
Агентство интернет-исследований sounds (looks) scarier IMO.
its russia primary troll farms, internet research angecy.
Yes, any evidence would be better than these fake numbers.
Image looks like a bunch of RMC cadets from Canada, a different type of brain-dead boot-licker.
Putin/poutine, eh!?
Between them and Queens poli sci kids, Kingston is full of winners
The Hip were about the only good thing to come out of that town.
Gonna have to disagree with you there bud. Many good bands have come from there.
I stand corrected. Pretty solid list.
Is this actually true? If so that’s seriously scary.
It’s pretty simple, everyone I argue with online is actually a Russian LLM.
That is a strawman of course, what is not a strawman is that a lot of the online discourse just mirrors Russian propaganda lines, especially once you go to AfD or FPÖ forums. It is almost 1to1 the RT narrative. Maybe just by accident and not related to evidence of Russia sponsoring and running right populist anti EU media platforms in Europe.
Russotroll factories have been public knowledge for years. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43621355-putinin-trollit was released in 2019.
Translated version e.g. here https://www.amazon.com/Putins-Trolls-Frontlines-Russias-Information/dp/1632461293
In the US they are just called content creators and tiktokers.
No, it’s a made up number. Lib disinfo.
I don’t like the Russian, I also don’t like disinfo and therefore I have to agree with you. Jokes are fine but some of the stuff that is being posted is written as if it were true. Russian disnformation is real but it does not necessarily rely on domestic Yandex server. I have not seen any evidence yet for impact on foreign psyops operations. The only credible information I have seen was on the reduction in Yandex search bots, which is the obvious reaction to the loss of server capacity.
And allegedly the same thing happened when Russia’s Internet backbones were severed at the beginning of the war… allegedly
I had wondered why /c/[email protected] is suddenly dead.
2/3s??? Wow, I was expecting a big number but not a sizeable majority
Made up number without an ounce of truth posted.
Now they are the silent majority lol gottem
Rekt 😎
the yandex datacenter strikes from ukraine, caused bot traffic from russia on some social media platforms to drop to zero or close to it. most if it was stoking division in conservative communities.
