It'd be interesting to see this data compared to an average of similar timeframes. Is a Sunday usage slump a weekly pattern, or is *that* Sunday exceptional?
Why isn't the US government doing an awareness campaign on how rife social media is with propaganda bots? Or at the very least, enabling people like you to get the data for it?
The social media companies have been able to leverage opacity, the point is to project a patina of political influence, I suspect opening those curtains is not what they want till they’re forced, and this government won’t force them.
Well the current government wouldn't want people to be privy to that data, for obvious reasons. But it is a good point. A new government agency tasked with tracking and pushing back against disinformation bots would be great
The prior presidential administration tried to help Facebook and other social media companies be aware of when these kinds of large misinformation campaigns were taking place. Simply letting them know. This became an enormous reactionary backlash. Peddled partly as the "twitter files". The social media companies doubled down in order to prevent any scrutiny. The people in charge of Meta's content moderation are MAGA party members.
because as you posted this, the current President of the USA was calling someone fat and mis-gendering them at a rally of his while his supporters punched them. really. that is why. there is no incentive to do work when the goal is berating all opponents.
r/baseball had a drop in activity for Friday because there were no games being played that day. Comparatively a close-fought playoff game was played on Thursday. That would account for a significant drop in posts totally organically.
r/pol is up 88%, which makes sense, r/conservative was up 188%, basically this was Russia’s main datacenter, it followed all the subs and routed humans to threads they found useful.
The bots themselves are people, the things that were hit were the datacenters, specifically including Russia’s main AI datacenter.
The way it would work is these LLMs process vast amounts of content looking for sensitive topics, then report those to humans with proposed responses.
The coordination AIs were destroyed in this attack, not the humans themselves that post, and those humans, without specific instructions, seem to go back to their default subs to post, like r/conservativer/politics, etc.
It means that the AI data enter would typically flag something in a subreddit like that they can be spun to be political (a girl character is the hero, what!?) and send the humans there to stir shit and talk up WOKE is evil and ruining my video games! Without the data center they just stick to their safe spaces like conservative or politics where things will always be politically relevant but maybe won’t give them access to sow discord to the average person and convince the non political user that the left is evil.
I'm curious if this is why the Steam forums are an absolute cesspool of despicable posts. Every single new or updated game is bombarded with "is this game woke" posts. I clicked through some of the profiles that post and it looked like they just go game by game spewing the same shit.
There's a dip in r/Millennials traffic and there was a thread where someone posted a meme that was like " a lot of millennials feel behind in life and feel infantilized because of it" and there were a bunch of people saying "not me, or anyone I know." While I don't doubt there's married homeowners with kids (who aren't struggling financially right now) it was strange that there were so many of them that noticed that specific thread and were like, emphatically disagreeing with the sentiment.
This makes me wonder if it's Russian posters or just useful idiots being pointed at like a gun. Without a leader to dictate to them they just kind of stand there, which is why they didn't really exist societally before Trump.
From what they're saying, the way it worked is this:
The "Russian bots" aren't actually bots (AI), they're humans.
These humans would basically be told "go to major, generic subreddits like /r/politics and /r/worldnews, wait for us to send you a link to a contentious post somewhere else, and sow discord in the big subreddit while you're waiting."
The algorithms that identified those contentious posts and determined which/how many "bots" to send to each were hosted in this data center Ukraine hit.
Without the coordinator algorithms, all the "bots" didn't know where to go, so they just sat in those big subreddits and trolled. Because they're real humans and not actual bots, they didn't go away when the data center got hit, but they lost any instructions on where to go.
That sounds like a dangerous amount of assumptions to make because the data seemed strange. Is there any actual proof, or just OP making up a narrative that they know reddit would eat up?
And considering OP is linking subs that do not exist as "proof", I wouldn't take anything they produce at face value.
interesting. so the humans/bots actually posted more on worldnews because they didn't have instructions to go somewhere else to troll? does that mean if you add up all of the drop in comments across all subs, it should roughly equal to the increased traffic in other subs?
Its literally weaponized confirmation bias. If activity falls, that is proof that there are bots all over. If activity goes up, that is proof that there are shills hiving locales.
There's no way to be wrong because OP defined A and B to both mean the same thing.
I worked in other AI, but this is basically how I’d set it up if I was architecting something, dumb AIs to do scanning and recommend posts, then humans to give it flavor.
Is this something that was previously suspected or an ad hoc hypothesis in response to the unexpected uptick in activity? You make it sound in another comment like it's more than your personal theory.
A couple weeks ago there was some dude arguing in a local sub using a specific phrase (like "liberty, fraternity, and equality") over and over again in that specific order but seemed to be authentically replying to people like a human, who was trying to intentionally post talking points. It was very odd.
How many Russians do you imagine are doing this? Like Reddit is a big site and these are big subreddits. Even using multiple accounts, there'd need to be multiple thousand Russian agents posting on literally every popular subreddit on this site. Even ones that don't have anything politically useful in their content.
The issue with your claim is that it is nonsense and the data you charted above covers a miscellaneous mixture of subs seeing daily up and down uses with the biggest numbers being based on non-related events like trailers or popular sports competitions. Going down means that bots are being killed. Going up means that there's more shills.
Literally what information could you have found in your analysis that would have convinced you that there wasn't a massive Russian propaganda campaign across the entire site?
So… I’m doing a more complex analysis right now, it’s churning, but I have this semi-raw data:
Basically after the second attack r/conspiracy fell by 35%, then it recovered to only down 15%. One thing though: r/conspiracy was REALLY busy before the attack, so this is an interesting data point.
I’m trying to find a meaningful model for this, and adding normalization helps but also makes the signal look different, more extreme in some cases, others seem smaller. Taking out sports helped though.
Not particularly suspicious in and of itself seeing as the way recent world politics is unfolding. A lot of Europeans are feeling a bit...miffed... at the US right now. To put it lightly.
/worldnews is another faction of bots, as everyone banned from there for talking about a certain Western-supported country's warcrimes can attest to.
can't really comment anything about /politics tho.
Smaller and more niche news subs would be more interesting.
You can get banned from world news without explanation for even questioning some of the reflexive anti American narrative eg pointing out that Trump didn’t even win 50% of the vote and blue states on their own are dramatically more vital than the resistance in eg Israel or Russia. Literally they will ban you, clearly compromised
I'm guessing that ShitAmericansSay has pretty legit traffic, the division between US and the rest of the world is very spontaneous, given how the US has been treating the rest of the world lately.
That's the thing, you can't even trust communities with legitimate grievances.
Our friends and allies abroad have every right to be angry about how our country is behaving. But bad actors seize on that anger and encourage it until it festers.
It's the same thing with Americans posting about things we don't like going on in America. We can vent about something as innocuous as car-centric infrastructure. But bad actors will absolutely fan the flames so it grows and turns to doomerism.
I was planning to just pull ufc/nascar and other obvious outliers, but that felt like data massaging. I might do it again with a note about what I pulled and why.
Readers, please don't hallucinate your own beliefs onto these graphs.
The data collected is insufficient to test the hypothesis that the datacenter attacks crippled Russian influence networks on Reddit, because it does not use appropriate historical data for comparison.
This would need to be done on a per-subreddit basis taking into account:
day of week
time of year/seasonality
occurrence of events specific to that subreddit, e.g. tournaments, races, matches, sales, scandals, film/TV/game releases, etc
This is a descriptive stacked before-after comparison. It is not an application of a causally identified stacked difference-in-differences ATT estimator, and no credible untreated group or known treatment exposure has been established.
Unresolved issues include only three nearby incidents, uncertain onset and recovery, serial dependence, carryover into later pre-windows, possible overlap in shifted windows, sparse historical matches, news/sports/holiday/moderation effects, provider coverage, and exploratory selection across many series. No held-out validation, community-specific news audit, formal multiplicity-adjusted inference or causal confidence interval is supplied.
I find it interesting you don't include any American State/Local or politically charged subreddits.
I would remove any sports subs simply because they're naturally spiky, but look at all the state subreddits, I bet you'll find a lot of bots activity there
Can we get a little more explanation of what's going on? The figure captions and github link don't help me understand. It feels like the data is presented in a way that assumes the viewer knows wtf is going on.
Ok, so it’s basically sub activity measured in 12 hour windows before and after each attack. There are anomalies like ufc, nascar and marvel which seem to be caused by actual events but otherwise usage dropped in those subs after attacks.
They were attacks against datacenters, I believe Kaluga was the critical one against an AI datacenter that was believed to be used to “route” bots to very specific posts.
Without that the data shows bots just pooling in r/conservative, r/politics and a few other places, likely because they had nobody to tell them where else to be.
UFC has a large very vocal contingent of Russian fans
Russia is only behind USA and Brazil when it comes to most champions by country and many of those champions have definitely used bot services to inflate social media followers, Islam Machachev especially
Looking at the summary CSV data (thanks for providing), it seems there are a meaningful number of subreddits with positive increases in activity.
With that in mind, it’s a bit hard to tease out causalities from handpicked, correlational drops in activity — much of what is charted is explained by subreddits independently having large fluctuations in activity on monthly and seasonal cycles.
For what it's worth, 2007scape (old school runescape sub) was rioting against a very poorly implemented game update (pete kayer) those exact dates after it was implemented on the 7th, then slowed down over the next few days once it was addressed and fixed
it's because activity in that subreddit increased after all three attacks (note: i'm only saying 'after', i am not saying 'because of') and this analysis is trying to find subreddits where the attacks caused decreased activity
So, this wasn’t the bot farm itself, this was the AI that coordinated them, it monitored things and routed humans to sensitive posts with proposed responses.
Yeah, there's literally no winning with these people. They can create a narrative either direction because they already have a conclusion to start with.
The actual headlines should be that there’s definite proof of Russian manipulation
There might be, but it's not this dataset. There is no reason why an attack on one datacenter would make TIL jump up and an attack on another one makes it decline, for example. What we see looks like unrelated fluctuations and OP picking up daily and weekly patterns. At the very least, we would need to
make the graphs cover the same time of a day, or 24 hour periods, or adjust for daily cycles
adjust all lines for weekly activity cycles
see the same graph for e.g. the previous week, to get an idea how large normal fluctuations are
These data are simply a visualization of noise that won’t reveal anything over this time period (after all, the last attack occurred over the weekend, so you can’t even attribute the overall drop to it). And prior to the third attack, the data centers were more or less handling the outages, so in theory, there shouldn’t be any changes at all at the first two data points.
OP had a fuller explanation of it upthread, it takes a minute to digest but it makes sense. Basically OP is saying that certain subs like r/conservative are like a “home base” for the disinformation accounts (not necessarily all bots, some human) who post in those subs until rerouted via the Yandex data center to threads where the algorithm has sniffed out some discussions that could be exploited through repetition of certain talking points.
It tracks if you’ve ever seen a normal conversation in a normal sub and then all of a sudden you see multiple accounts posting different versions of the same edgy point, where normally anyone who agreed with that point would just upvote the other person or reply to them with something that added to their point.
The problem is that OP's hypothesis is highly speculative and based on an extremely limited dataset. Given any dataset limited in such a manner you could construct a hypothesis that would fit the data and conclude whatever you want it to conclude.
So, this wasn’t the bot farm itself, this was the AI that coordinated them, it monitored things and routed humans to sensitive posts with proposed responses.
I have no idea how accurate that is, but that would track with my experience on Reddit. I've had comments that would get some replies shortly after posting from people already in the discussion, then other activity filtering in as the discussion carries on, but there are some hot takes or polarizing comments that would suddenly get bombarded with multiple hostile replies in a short timeframe.
So, this wasn’t the bot farm itself, this was the AI that coordinated them
This seems like motivated reasoning. You have no proof that Yandex datacenters are involved in Reddit activity and are fitting a preferred explanation to the observed numbers.
>According to Kevin Limonier, a specialist in the Russian-speaking cyberspace, one can nevertheless suppose “that certain components of the pipelines that constitute most social media bots today have ceased to function, rather than the bots as a whole. It could be an LLM hosted in Yandex Cloud that suddenly becomes unavailable, an orchestrator like n8n that is meant to automate actions and is no longer online… ”
But yes, this is theoretical based on our speculation on their architecture.
R/canada started down 30%, then stabilized and ended up 30%.
Which tracks with what we saw: basically this datacenter was Russia’s main AI datacenter, and it’s believed they used it to track posts throughout the internet and route humans accordingly, giving them proposed responses, etc.
Basically no actual Canadian has posted there for years, other than a minority with the critical thinking skills of a cricket who can't see a bot from the trees. So agreed.
r/Millennial getting up there doesn't surprise me AT ALL. The amount of posts I've been seeing on there criticizing gen Z with boomer language SCREAMS manufactured class war fodder.
Bruh lol the most insidious thing about foreign interference is that they don't need to use politics to foment instability. You'd be shocked to know how much of your non political feed was curated specifically with political intent.
Edit: lmao an account made less than a year ago with posts from millennials and xennials (another sub with quite a lot of culture war bullshit) and comments in top subs like TIL. Never seen a bot more obvious in my life.
To any who find this comment chain: know that there are real and fake people on the Internet who seek to kindle even the most banal conflicts in western society. Bots and trolls come in many shape and forms, and we've been living with them online for over a decade. They have a predictable pattern but be wary of new patterns they may adopt.
I don’t mean to be rude, but that graph is unreadable. Is r/todayilearned green or slightly less green? It’s impossible to match color from a legend to lines when this many lines are present—no color map can save you. It might be better to have a table where subreddit = rows, events = columns and percent change values are printed in each cell. You could then apply a background color to each cell based on the magnitude and sign of the change. Use a diverging color map and include a color bar. Just my $.02
This is so hard to read and looks like the type of fonts and color contrast that Claude has frequently made for me. Please choose fonts that aren't as thin and maximize the contrast between the font color and background. If your data viz image is bigger than a lot of screens, remember the scale that your users are more likely to be looking at it with.
I knew Fauxmoi has a ton of bots on it, so that decline doesn't surprise me at all. Also Brazil's Sub reddit declining doesn't surprise me considering Russian Bots would love to target that election
Looking at literally the day before and day after doesn't say anything, at all, like not even close. This is quite literally the definition of illiteracy in the context of data science. Especially considering this was over a weekend. Zoom the fuck out
Right. I mean, I get it, that's social media. And it's kind of futile to even bother sometimes it seems. But in a lot of ways this event is extremely similar to another event which happened earlier this decade which was then seized upon by opportunists and subsequently spiraled way out of control, largely due to completely unethical and low quality "data science". There's actually a few of these situations that have happened.
I know Reddit is obviously a biased sample but... actually, I think this is why I prefer Reddit over any of the others. At least Reddit on the surface tends to still be centered around actual news stories, sometimes. So you get the official narrative and some sample of what "regular" people think. And anyway, the point towards which I began writing this paragraph was that, not that I think I am any less fallible than anyone else, it increasingly is evident that in almost all situations which actually matter, and the truth about those situations is important to know, the people who understand the nuance and explain it - in other words, the truth - is buried beneath all kinds of mutually reinforcing nonsense.
You need to control for day of the week and other possible factors. To be valid for drawing any conclusions whatsoever, this needs multivariate analysis and more control data.
outside of the data being cool and viral, this is an atrocious chart. nothing can be followed, theres no logical sorting, colors are meaningless, lines are so blurred they themselves are meaningless.
I’ve been a lurker in a couple of explain the joke subreddits for years and it definitely seems like a hot bed for AI bots. Humor makes up a significant amount of communications on reddit (and across the internet) and deciphering the meaning behind a lot of the jokes you come across (especially on reddit) can be difficult for AI. It also gives bots the context to karma farm.
Same thing with any “isitAI” subreddit though that’s a little more obvious. If you’re active in any of those communities you’re just feeding the beast
I would like to see the data for r/conservative. I heard reports that activity dropped. But I am banned because I wrote "I am a liberal" in another sub.
I would also like to see the change in activity from subs like r/medicareforall . It seems to me like the negative comments have gone away. I am interested to see if it is connected in any way.
Then there are the political groups. What happened there? I want to see left leaning data and right leaning data too.
Meanwhile pro-Israel r/mapporn has a 54% reduction.
No one has exploded Israel's data centres yet so we dont know how many Israeli bots are there. But safe to say there are many. They love dehumanizing Palestinians( using slang like "Pali") and preaching how totally innocent their shithole is.
Settlement violence in West Bank ?. Hah thats just Iranian illusion. Point out Israel's well documented history of propping up Hamas to weaken PLO?? Mass dislikes.
Now if you have the guts try and make your post history public. So weird not one pro Israel account dares do that .
Would you mind being freely transparent about your hidden post history considering your justified concern towards bots.? Israel takes the 2nd position after Russia for internet bot network. Every pro Israel account I have hides their post history.
Whether bots do it or not , Israel has well deserved shit reputation proven by Pew poll morning consult.
A simple reading through any mainstream Western newspapers would expose Israel's crimes and atrocities.
I have a chart, it’s very strong there, r/peterexplainsthejoke especially, but a lot of r/interesting, etc, I can try to coerce it here if there’s interest, it’s just awkward to go from my computer to my tablet for Reddit.
I commented an empathetic and pretty mildly leftist opinion calling for collective action last week there and I immediately got called a bot by two aggressive, inorganic-sounding accounts saying my take couldn’t possibly be from a real account, and that my account history being private is another sign that I “must be a bot.”
I also immediately got another odd-feeling comment about how “no one has time or energy to have real empathy, I checked out of trying to care years ago” etc.
It seems a lot of bot comments are either combative or nihilistic, both to the same end of trying to inject some odd type of complacency and hopelessness. They must have found that to be the only tactic left to start contrarian shit on an empathetic or positive comment is to start accusing humans of being bots to obscure reality further. I’m so glad this is coming to light because online comment discourse has felt super off for a while now.
I got permanently banned there just for saying that CIA assets fuck over proletarian women and can rest in piss on a post about Gloria Steinem. They said it was "uncivil" but it's not even directed at anyone on the subreddit and I don't even think it's that controversial to say imho.
This is a very small selection of 30 subreddits filtered by those that declined in activity among over 1200 analyzed subreddits, not a representative sample whatsoever. Talk about confirmation bias.
Thank you, I found the data on GitHub and was thrilled but I don’t think I did a good job.
Also, there are a lot of interesting patterns, my concern is this is just raw data without any control at all, so there is a lot of room for distortion.
07scape in this time scale coincides with Runefest and the reaction to the dumb shit Jagex have announced & the attempted claw back. The Runescape subs punch way above their weight for what they are
I'm sure with this new data Reddit Inc., will take steps to amend the bot problem on their site because they care about a free and fair environment... NOTTTTTTTT
I think ufc/nascar was because there was an event that day, I left the data in.
I have more data, it looks like they basically went to default subs instead of widespread monitoring of sensitive topics, which tracks with a large AI datacenter being hit as that’s basically its job.
Is that just me or most of those aren't really default ones? At least it rarely gets recommended to me. Maybe because I'm Russian. I'm not using vpn for reddit, obviously. I mean: nascar, baseball, golf - surely those won't be very popular internationally?
If you look through the data, posting on conservative is way up. The working hypothesis is that the AI that was destroyed was responsible for finding discussions that could be hijacked and routing other people/bots to those discussions. Without the AI for finding those posts, the other people/bots are increasing their posting on "safe" subreddits that act as their homebases a ton but not really posting much outside those homebases much
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u/seannyb 6h ago
It'd be interesting to see this data compared to an average of similar timeframes. Is a Sunday usage slump a weekly pattern, or is *that* Sunday exceptional?