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/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/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/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.