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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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.

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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.

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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.

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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