r/technology • u/ArgentineBeauty • 18h 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
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u/OkCoconut3270 17h ago

Not just Russia, but it wouldn't be a bad start

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u/mleb_mleb_mleb 16h ago edited 11h ago

as far as the uprise of idiot flavored conservatism in the US goes, russia is number one by a long shot. so many years i said the conservative sub was a farce and would always be met with "oh so just because you don't like it it's bots??"

no, this, the old doj blogs sharing regular crackdowns on fake news websites and social media accounts pushing insane conservative rhetoric and untold facebook pages targeting our moms and dads which bald eagle skull yeah memes, arresting russian operatives who stayed stateside to pay influencers to publish certain content ... all of that shit was manufactured and the stupidest part is it worked. it wasn't bots because i didn't like it, it was bots because it was so brazenly unhinged that it was probably fucking bots.

i worked in a blue collar job for a decade. even the younger bro rogan dork types didn't use reddit, they called it a "liberal shit hole". i'm sure there was a small handful of unhinged people who got lost on their way to 4chan that surfed /r/conservative but for the most part i've always believed that sub existed not to sway people to become low IQ magas, but to exist on this site as a division amplifier. how many threads in these past years had comments upvoted with something along the lines of "i just peeped at /r/conservative and there's no mention of this anywhere". its always been around to uphold a sense of tribalism and division, i don't doubt reddit has sold the keys to it to a nation state. it is funny to see its activity drop off though, which really confirms my general experience that nation states have been behind that sub for quite some time now.

there is indeed an angry part of me that just wants to say cut the fucking undersea cables to russia. but there's always collateral damage in that. what id really like is for thought leaders to come together and try to solution something because we've collectively done checks notes literally nothing to try to curb this bullshit to date. this moment is honestly the first time where we can honestly just straight up feel how much of our bullshit this past decade is hugely attributed to russia. peoples family's have been destroyed over the impacts of this shit, people have been murdered and detained as we live the reality of all of this misinformation and fake persona that has flooded platforms. tech companies have enabled this shit. dickheads like peter thiel and musk and project 2025 find a lot of convenient overlap in these misinformation/destabilization initiatives and they all helped open the white house doors to russia as soon as trump won. and now we're just compromised as fuck at the federal level so i'm not like hopeful that america can "wake up". i'm sure they're scrambling to get these operations back online at other data centers considering these are largely nation-state sponsored initiatives in russia.

these assholes will continue the left vs right illusion for us peasants to squabble over while they build and fortify the actual top vs bottom systemic division globally for as long as we stay dumb.

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u/Allegorist 15h ago edited 15h ago

The worst was r/The_Donald in the 2016 cycle and briefly thereafter. It was so obviously manufactured that it would have been called out in days at this point. And to some extent it was called out, but lots of people had never seen that kind of thing before. That was really the introduction to this kind of bullshit on Reddit. It wasn't mostly bots at the time, but rather Russian government contracted agencies with buildings full of people working 24/7 to push their narrative with dozens of accounts managed by each person. And it was actually shut down because it was eventually shown to be just that, but the damage was done, and Russia realized how effective it was.

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u/AvoidMyRange 14h ago

I got banned back then for "spam" when I pointed out every T_D user in the politics subs cosplaying.

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u/ShredsHardcock 16h ago

Reddit is an absolutely a toxic corporation. My favorite is the subs where attention seeking idiots post pictures of themselves at two points in time, or shaving off their hair, or a "glow up", to assist in the training of surveillance AI

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u/TheEldestNugget 13h ago

This site is directly responsible for Trump's election in 2016.

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u/Protiguous 4h ago

You type like an engineer.

(This observation is not intended as an insult, just a familiarity.)

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u/Salihe6677 17h ago

When I heard about Biden's initiative to bring broadband Internet to more rural areas, my first thought was, "dear god, why, have you seen what they've done with it?"

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u/GetThePuckOut 16h ago

As someone who was on the "internet" before dial-up was even a thing, I can relate so hard to this.

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u/ShredsHardcock 16h ago

He was the senator from Delaware. Making sure that corporations have free access to the pudding brains of small town america, and free money from the government , has been his job for basically his entire career.

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u/Hackwork89 13h ago

I got banned on /r/LateStageCapitalism for suggesting that Russian bot farms exist.

Do with that information as you please, but I definitely found it interesting at the time that they would ban for speaking against Russia.