r/SipsTea • u/Previous_Month_555 • 4h ago

Feels good man Russian disinformation bot traffic nearly eliminated overnight after Ukraine drone strikes cripple multiple Russian data centers.

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23.8k Upvotes

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1.4k

u/WakeUpFriendly 4h ago

Bombing propaganda sourcing data centers is actually an interesting war tactic. It’s a war on messaging. Interesting indeed.

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u/Stout_And_About 4h ago

The War On Error.

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u/fuzzy_emojic 4h ago

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u/cobrastrikes-2x 3h ago

Lmao what the fuck is that movie?

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u/EyeDry6251 3h ago

Doctor Who

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u/cobrastrikes-2x 3h ago

Are even half of the character designs this goofy? Because if so I’ll binge it right now.

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u/SweetOkashi 3h ago

Strax is a bit of a standout in that department, but there are some wonderfully developed characters with interesting designs.

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u/cobrastrikes-2x 3h ago

Okay fair. I’d heard Corey Taylor made a cameo at one point, so I may finally take the plunge.

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u/Oliver_Wynx 3h ago

The sontarans (like this dude) are especially goofy, but there are some real funny looking aliens.

https://giphy.com/gifs/fVVfz6PH1qmRp7cxql

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u/keeper0fstories 2h ago

Alien? That is the last pure blooded human in the galaxy at that time period.

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u/keeper0fstories 2h ago

The Darleks, one of the biggest threats to The Doctor has a toilet plunger for a hand, and what looks like an egg beater on the other. Also, they originally couldn't go up the stairs.

Fun times.

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u/Lots42 2h ago

Character designs get super weird. One time everyone on Earth looked like one son of a bitch dude.

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u/SevereStereograph 3h ago

Doctor Who, Series 8, Episode 1, "Deep Breath" (2014)

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u/Bucky_Ohare 4h ago

Rofl, I hate how much that made me chuckle

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u/jetpack324 3h ago

This is hilarious and so accurate! I’m going to use this without crediting you. My apologies for the theft.

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u/Flomo420 3h ago

https://thousandislandsrecords.ca/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_2824.jpeg

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u/AnthrallicA 3h ago

Still as poignant as ever. I really wish I had taken this record more seriously when it came out.

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u/Flomo420 3h ago

turns out it was extremely fucking prescient

fat mike saw that shit coming a mile away

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u/WakeUpFriendly 4h ago

I like that 😂 I’m stealing it.

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u/hung-games 3h ago

Motion to name the next missile “The Editor”

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u/Trap_Queen_Stacy 4h ago

………../S

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u/rsam487 4h ago

Ukraine has pioneered a few interesting tactics to get the upper hand in this war. Max Fisher did a brilliant video on it, the procurement stuff is about as cool as procurement could get

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u/Left_Palpitation4236 3h ago

Upper hand is a stretch.

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u/FailedAustrianArtist 4h ago edited 3h ago

It stops the foreign propaganda bots, but we are also building even more of our own massive bot farm data centers.

Remember at least 50% of all of global bot traffic already comes from the US of A.

It's no wonder our people are the most propagandized in the world.

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u/Critical_Concert_689 3h ago

Remember at least 50% of all of global bot traffic already comes from the US of A.

Remember, at least 50% of THE ENTIRE INTERNET is bot traffic.

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u/Ishmael_1974 3h ago

Good

The only good propaganda is my propaganda

Corruption is only bad if I’m not involved

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u/Happy2BTheOne 4h ago

It’s brilliant. Without them republicans loose the midterms and trump gets impeached. Any other president would be better for Ukraine.

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u/BuzzkillMcGillicuddy 3h ago

Yeah but they're back online, and midterms are a month away

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u/the-player-of-games 3h ago

So you're saying Ukraine has a week or two to take the rest of them out ?

Can be done!

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u/Wise3315 3h ago

Breathe and think.

5

u/the-player-of-games 3h ago

I keep thinking about how one drone costing on the order of 100k dollars can be enough to take out a data center hosting millions of fake accounts posting hate and divisiveness to tens of millions of people

The more that get taken out, the easier I breathe

3

u/Wise3315 2h ago

There is no technical write-up about this event in any professional IT journals. The event is propaganda. And who would most benefit from the masses thinking a Russian ( or any propaganda army is down and out? The one who needs the cloak, which would be the propaganda bot management. Aka Russia in your example.

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u/the-player-of-games 2h ago

Ukraine should continue the campaign so that "professional IT journals" can get more data for their "technical write-up"

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u/Wise3315 2h ago

Whatever it takes for you to make it through the night, player.

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u/German_Merman 3h ago

In completely unrelated news, Elon's latest racist tweet has got ~5k likes instead of his usual ~500k. He's definitely cutting Ukraine off from Starlink for this.

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u/SomeNotTakenName 4h ago

I mean... targeting communication infrastructure is about as basic as it gets though.

That being said, I have yet to see a credible source for those centers being related to a drop in bot activity. From what I was able to find, they were mostly running web crawlers and scrapers.

I would expect all the troll farms to live on US data centres, or more likely US based cloud providers, like AWS or Azure. Why would you let everyone know you are a Russian bot, when you could hide in US infrastructure instead?

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u/Critical_Concert_689 3h ago

I have yet to see a credible source for those centers being related to a drop in bot activity.

From what I was able to find, they were mostly running web crawlers and scrapers.

FYI. That IS the bot activity that dropped. For obvious reasons:

A data center that runs a major search engine was taken out, and was no longer able to run scripts to scrape, sort, archive, etc. internet content.

It's funny that the current propaganda push is that "bot traffic" is synonymous with "social media propaganda and advertisement."

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u/SomeNotTakenName 2h ago

I figured, since that is what cloudflare and co reported.

crazy how everyone just jumped on the "russion bots are gone" train. Probably helpful for the Russian bots.

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u/Enough_Path2929 4h ago

Maybe the reason for increase in data centers lol

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u/SomeNotTakenName 3h ago

Ehh, honestly AWS and the like have plenty enough to run some bots. Astonishingly cheap too. You can get a virtual machine on there powerful enough to let a bot tweet all day for like cents a day.

For a class we got like 15 bucks in credit for AWS VMs, and despite running multiple of them for assignments none of us reached the 15 in a quarter.

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u/WakeUpFriendly 3h ago

You seem very knowledgeable about this. I’m not. And you make a good point about verification. So do you know what can lead to a decrease in bot activity, and if there’s actually been a decrease in bot activity? It would be cool if we could target bots, and equally cool if we could regulate how bots spread misinformation within our infrastructure.

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u/SomeNotTakenName 2h ago

I have been googling around about the claim that russian bots went quiet and couldn't find anything.

Best I could find was a decrease in activity across social media and other sites, but that would match the web crawler and scraper statements. (meaning less automated tools visiting websites to collect information)

And honestly for you and me there's not a lot we can do about bots. The operators of the social media sites probably could if they wanted to.

As far as targeting infrastructure, that's a whole other can of worms. AWS for example offers cloud based resources, but if you do your due diligence, they won't have access to what you are doing with those resources. So at best you could force them to deny business to certain entities, but that is a risky game to play to begin with, and especially considering US companies are already being seen as less reliable recently, with some nations working on abandoning windows for their government organisations as a precaution. That started around the time Elon shut off Starlink in Ukraine for a while.

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u/Cassp3 3h ago

Yeah... Believe I want it to magically be real. But reddit has a serious case of wishful thinking.

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u/codeverity 3h ago

Obviously this is anecdotal but I spend a lot of time on twt because that's where my fandoms are, and the difference after the attack was like night and day and is still markedly different right now. Normally the fyp is full of blue check accounts with random AI slop stories, and if you check the comments on political posts or contentious topics etc they're swarming with blue checks or accounts with rage bait etc.

Yesterday and even today, the blue checks are basically gone and the rage baiting is pretty much gone as well. It feels more like an app full of people communicating than anything. Some suspicious 'US' accounts that are posting stuff have a noticeable gap from a certain point on the 10th until sometime today.

I also go on threads and I've noticed fewer longer multi-post threads with obvious AI slop stories, and I've seen so many people on both platforms commenting on how different things feel. Only today have I seen an uptick in anything suspicious, and it's been accounts abruptly pushing a 'you guys are just imagining it, social media bots weren't affected' narrative. So yeah, anecdotal but I really think their command structure at the least was impacted.

2

u/Critical_Concert_689 3h ago

mfw Ukraine DID in fact single-handedly take out all Right-Wing bots on the internet and now only Left-Wing bots still exist.

This is the explanation for WHY "everyone" appears to be buying in to the wishful thinking on Reddit.

1

u/GerryManDarling 3h ago

US data centers are too expensive for the Russians, they can't even pay for their gas now.

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u/Desperate-Tomatillo7 3h ago

A lot of reasons. One of them is that cloudflare and most notable websites already bans unusual traffic from IPs coming from these services, as it is considered non-residential. The grunt of the bot traffic comes from Eastern Europea, Russia and South Asia.

0

u/Wise3315 3h ago

I haven't even looked proof of concept up yet. If they had it, they would have published. What has been shown is standard propaganda, and most likely bot propaganda. In fact , a great strategic move by Russian bot farms.

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u/SomeNotTakenName 2h ago

I had not considered the "oh noe we are no longer operational wink " angle, but it does make sense

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u/Immediate-Count-1202 4h ago

Great timing with the midterms around the corner.

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u/SignoreBanana 4h ago

Http status code 409

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u/senormonje 3h ago

Another reason to back Ukraine so they can do what we can't.

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u/GerryManDarling 3h ago

This will be a huge issue for Trump's mid-term campaign, also for all the alt-right/alt-left parties in EU.

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u/n33lo 3h ago

Man, you know these bot farms will be back up lickity split.

2

u/Warm-Discipline5136 3h ago

Needs to be done all the time now.

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u/ZenBreaking 3h ago

A few more of these and a few AI data centres wouldn't go a miss. Might claw back some sort of normal Internet per se

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u/Lost_Department_2177 3h ago

Their pages are brainwashing idiots into supporting them

NATO report

https://ccdcoe.org/uploads/2026/04/ONTOLOGICAL_FOUNDATIONS_OF_COGNITIVE_WARFARE.pdf

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u/xxNightingale 3h ago

Information warfare is a thing since ages ago. But this time its striking at the root xd

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u/wellarmedsheep 3h ago

Yes, my first reaction to this was: man we are learning a lot about the future of warfare in this conflict

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u/rickster11134 3h ago

Unfortunately that was a warehouse/distribution center. Data centers usually don't have truck bays.

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u/stanbright 2h ago

well, it's war on fake messaging and disinformation.

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u/Eye_of_the_red_giant 2h ago

Can’t wait to do this in Ace Combat 9

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u/Rudy_Gin_Fizz 2h ago

Right before American mid-terms is very strategic Well done Ukraine

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u/azorej 3h ago

Do you understand that these data centers most likely are not related to propaganda directly? Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that data centers can't be a valid target in the war. I'm just confused that people assume that troll bot farms will be located in Yandex data centers. The idea itself sounds illogical.

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u/swagonflyyyy 3h ago

They didn't do it because of that. They did that in retaliation for Russia doing the same to Ukraine's data centers in a tit-for-tat tactic.

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u/KickBalls80 3h ago

So, even better morally?

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u/DaRandomStoner 4h ago edited 3h ago

I'm all for it... with any luck Russia will retaliate soon against the western ones!

Edit: Ah... you guys are just anti-Russia not anti-data center and propoganda more broadly. My bad I'll see myself out...

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u/BLAZE_IT94 3h ago

I'm more looking forward to the Chinese bots getting wrecked.

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u/Any-Expression-7027 3h ago

At this point, why would anyone not be anti-Russia? You fool.