r/CriticalThinkingIndia • u/PrimedGold • 1d ago

Science, Tech & Medicine Following Ukraine’s attack on Yandex’s data centers, Russian bot activity across American platforms appears to have declined significantly. A Swedish engineer rans tests by posting pro-H-1B visa content and observed no anti-Indian hate in response.

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u/Beginning_Net5713 1d ago

Wait, what? What could they possibly even gain from these?

Although, a conspiracy like theory could be Russia is desperate for money and China offered a good price to spread anti-India propaganda. Just a shower thought tho.

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u/Altruistic_Bank_1552 Congressi 1d ago

They want to destabilise Western democracies and end the trust their people have in liberal democracies, leading to political collapse. This isn't targeted at Indians; we were simply a tool they used because we happened to be the largest group of incoming migrants to the English-speaking world after COVID (except for America, but since they followed a single anti-Indian campaign in the English-speaking world, they extended it even to the US).

They did the same against North African and Arab refugees and immigrants in the European Union and against Eastern Europeans in the UK.

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u/Beginning_Net5713 1d ago

Most of these hate is on western platforms tho? How did anti-bot mechanics fail here?

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u/Altruistic_Bank_1552 Congressi 1d ago edited 1d ago

You're overestimating Western competence and the greed of these American tech bros.

Musk has time and again supported Russia and bashed Ukraine, asking Ukraine to give in to Russia. Is it any surprise that he has allowed Russian bots to have a free hand on X after his takeover?

The Far-Right in the West is also heavily compromised and in cahoots with Russia because they share similar racist and homophobic views and want to build civilisational ties with Russia.

The US has also regularly blocked the EU's attempts to regulate American social media platforms in their countries.

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u/PrimedGold 1d ago

Not quite. You can look at IG and Reddit as well. None of these are owned by Musk.

Its just standard Russian pattern. Another thing, from what I am reading now, is a lot of bots portray to be right leaning conservatives. That doesn’t mean all conservatives are bots.

They tend to comment and prop up human right leaning influencers on Indian hate, which they then feed on to boost engagement.

Also EU does regulate a lot, but they can’t simply block bot activity because platforms themselves seem to have a hard time doing it.

That also doesn’t mean Russian bots wont do the same on an EU owned and regulated platform.

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u/fenrir245 21h ago

Bots aren't the only way Russia exerts influence. Tim Pool, a very popular conservative influencer, was literally caught getting funded by Russia to push his rhetoric.

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u/PrimedGold 1d ago

Anti-Bot mechanics itself is hard to implement. They change tactics and patterns. AFAIK Elon was very public about taking troves of bots down initially but then stopped posting about them.

They have mechanics, but they didn’t seem to work.

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u/EruIluvatar_Sym 1d ago

Why do you think SM platforms want bots to go away? They thrive in the engagement it brings. Reddit is a prime example.

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u/HzD_Upshot 1d ago

I remember reading articles about how anti-bot mechanisms or anti-hate mechanism were bad for engagement so X and meta started rolling them back and marketed it as making their platforms more apolitical.

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u/throwaway0845reddit 15h ago

Russians have always had a "white pride" culture almost as much and as terrifying as Nazism. Stalin and his comrades killed more people than Hitler. They were always the real bad guys and villains in this world. Their entire ideology and country is based on mass murder, genocide and if it wasn't for good people, Russia would have destroyed all life on earth with their nukes in the cold war era.

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u/PrimedGold 1d ago

I still dont know how hard was it for X to weed these bots out, that it really took blowing up Yandex’s data centers to actually curb them.

But yea, never really trusted Russia lol.

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u/Altruistic_Bank_1552 Congressi 1d ago

Elon Musk actively encouraged them because it benefits him. The man has actively supported Russia against Ukraine, lmao, and has asked Ukraine to roll over to Russia.

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u/PrimedGold 1d ago

Not just X man even Reddit. Check this out. r/news’ traffic was down 65% or so after Ukraine took out Yandex’s data center in the Vladimir region.