r/technology • u/ArgentineBeauty • 19h ago

Society Ukraine Struck Yandex Data Centers, Russian Bots Went Silent—Now Questions Are Mounting

https://united24media.com/war-in-ukraine/ukraine-struck-yandex-data-centers-russian-bots-went-silent-now-questions-are-mounting-23339
38.2k Upvotes

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9.4k

u/PrizeSyntax 19h ago

Bots need data centers to run, data centers stopped working, bots stopped working. What's so complicated about that?

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u/potatodrinker 19h ago

Social media engagement metrics were down like 30% suddenly and some of us had to explain, awkwardly, it's the non humans who died during those strikes. Path to recovery is to get more DCs up and flood our platforms with bots once more.

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u/GoodMix392 18h ago

I’d be curious to know how much the social media giants rely on bot traffic to convince investors that they are experiencing user growth each quarter. Like they must know that a significant portion of their traffic is just bots. I feel this is also cheating companies who pay to advertise on these platforms.

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u/a-stack-of-masks 18h ago

100%. They're all aware they're overvalued, but can't admit it or they'll be screwed when the bubble pops. 

Good thing they're selling all their shares to our retirement funds huh?

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u/xiaorobear 17h ago edited 17h ago

I feel this is also cheating companies who pay to advertise on these platforms.

Yeah, that is a big part of why they don't want to crack down on it. A similarly bad precursor to this that shows their history of scamming advertisers, back in the 2010s Facebook was found to have inflated its video viewership numbers by 150%-900%, by including things like the video being loaded as someone just scrolled past it. Adam (formerly of collegehumor) wrote that those numbers caused sites like collegehumor and funny or die to massively pivot into trying facebook content and paying to promote it because it seemed like the viewership numbers for it over linking to their external site would be massively worth it, but it just resulted in CH's ad revenue going way down and helping them go out of business. Facebook got a 40 million dollar fine, which is nothing.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/facebook-pay-40-million-under-proposed-settlement-video-metrics-suit-1245807/

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u/Opie59 17h ago

RIP Cracked.

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u/SamiraSimp 15h ago

rip, what a website. used to spend so much time there after school everyday, discussing posts with my friends the next day, it's a great example of the "older internet" compared to now. which is weird because at the time that was the "new internet" to me and it was already so different from what i considered the "old internet" at that time

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u/Xalara 15h ago

At least we got Dropout from the wreckage.

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u/VengeanceKnight 13h ago

We need more of Adam ruining everything.

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u/jl2l 18h ago

This is underpinning the entire digital economy spending. If you say this out too loud, I think the entire digital advertising economy collapses.

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u/SMLLR 17h ago

Been hoping for this for a long while.

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u/Mr_Quackums 14h ago

As a small busness owner who relies on internest ads - the ONLY ads that are worth the money are ones targeting location + search terms.

Once you pay extra for targeting ads based on gender, age, habits, history, etc. then the ads stop becoming cost effective. Maybe if you have a multi-million dollar advertising budget effectiveness stops mattering.

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u/emPtysp4ce 11h ago

I don't really give a shit about the poor widdle advertising industry, they can choke on it. I'm only worried about the knock-on effects it'll have on the rest of the economy and the sectors of it I do give a shit about.

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u/mikki-misery 17h ago

I can guarantee you that it's pretty much all of them. And it's not just social media, it's basically everything digital that has advertising and/or investors. I have no idea how everything hasn't collapsed yet, but it's surely imminent.

It doesn't even have to be bots either. They'll do anything to inflate the numbers other than outright embezzling them because it's not strictly illegal. Look at Microsoft's Copilot as an example, it's installed on every Windows device, and they paid LG to install it on the TVs a few months ago, all so they can say that they have 250+ million users or whatever the number is.

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u/Enygma_6 16h ago

That was part of apartheid-boy's argument about why he should be allowed to buy Twitter, because he claimed it was full of bots.
Then after he got his way, he immediately disbanded the internal teams that worked on preventing malicious bots from getting on the platform.

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u/pinkycatcher 15h ago

There's a reason Reddit started to let users hide their profiles, to cover up how many bots are active.

Go look at the front page, it's 90% sketchy accounts with generic names and hidden profiles. There's hundreds of small subs that have weird posting metrics too, once you stumble on one you'll start to recognize how fake it all is.

Lots of propaganda going around.

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u/Dull_Bid6002 15h ago

Advertisers would at least get to see what kind of return they're getting to see the kind of sell or click through rate.

I suspect that's one reason why you don't see the big companies on certain platforms all that much.

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u/Tee_zee 12h ago

Ads don't pay off views though, they pay platforms based on conversion rates. Bots dont buy anything. Marketers aren't stupid

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u/Netheri 18h ago

I think we all need to take a moment of silence for the real unspoken victims of war; bot farms feeding you propaganda on social media.

Such a terrible waste, those bot farms could have gone on to manipulate elections. War is truly hell.

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u/Journeyman42 18h ago

Such a terrible waste, those bot farms could have gone on to manipulate elections. War is truly hell.

Legit, Russia could be using those data centers for something productive and economical, or for scientific research. But instead they use it for propaganda bullshit.

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u/RedditJumpedTheShart 17h ago

"These measurements show a sharp reduction in automated network activity, but cannot establish whether Russian propaganda bots disappeared or whether damaged infrastructure stopped generating ordinary automated traffic."

There is nothing that verifies this was a bot farm.

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u/orus_heretic 17h ago

They've manipulated every western election since at least 2016, that we know of. Cambridge Analytica was weirdly forgotten by people. From US, to Brexit, to EU elections.

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u/fs2d 13h ago

CA being "forgotten" about was 100% by design IMO

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u/Whatthegabriel 17h ago

Are there any serious sources for this?

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u/potatodrinker 17h ago

Not yet. Maybe wait a few days for journos to verify things. Wouldn't be surprised if it was 20-40%.

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u/puzilla 18h ago

I love this stat if true, but haven’t found a reference to it. Any sources you could share?

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u/design_by_hardt 17h ago

Is there evidence those metrics are down? Not doubting you, just want to read about it.

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u/modest_merc 19h ago

Source?

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u/potatodrinker 18h ago

My job in digital marketing. One data point though.

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u/mgr86 18h ago

That’s a darkly hilarious metric. It’s only been about 30% of their data centers hit too. Surely they are not the only origin for bot traffic either. Makes you wonder

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u/158cm_Otaku 18h ago

There was a post years ago showing a US Air Force base as having the highest amount of traffic to Reddit iirc

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u/RedditJumpedTheShart 17h ago

Almost like the US military routes their overseas traffic through the US because of security.

Tired of seeing that dumb shit repeated on Reddit without an ounce of thought as to why.