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/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.