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/no1_vern 17h ago edited 17h ago

The real question is: are sysadmins paying attention to which accounts are not logging in or making posts?Also, what are their plans going forward?

EDIT: How much traffic did Reddit see drop yesterday and today?

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u/whiskeytab 15h ago

they could easily cut Russia off tomorrow if they wanted to, any serious business that doesn't work with Russia is already doing that for security reasons

Reddit never will because they know this garbage basically prints money for them and they don't care about the consequences

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u/JohnnySmithe81 14h ago

Most bot posts from Russia don't originate from Russia, it would defeat the purpose of an influence campaign. They pay for servers in other countries or get individuals to setup relays in the target country.

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u/boyuber 12h ago

The bots keep you angry and engaged. Reddit has no incentive to stop them

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u/_litz 16h ago

Not as much as Twitter/X dropped, I'm sure

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u/slow70 16h ago

I’d love to see the stories this data tells…

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u/sphinxsley 15h ago

Likewise Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

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u/redmongrel 16h ago

Reddit claims to care but it’s more important to them to show investors the “growing engagement numbers.” They’re not here to save the world any more than Meta is, they just happen to have a layer of chumps who work for free.

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u/swirve-psn 14h ago

Those chumps are mostly people who seek power over others in any form possible...

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u/redmongrel 11h ago

Oh yes I know, I am banned from my (un)fair share of subs.

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u/throwaway928816 14h ago

mods catching strays

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u/Logical_Mix_4627 11h ago

It’s because there’s no regulations in place to enforce these requirements. You think digital financial services companies in the US are allowed to enable financial transaction with Russia? Tell your lawmakers to impose regulations on social media traffic like they do for financial networks and it will go away.

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u/redmongrel 9h ago

They will interpret that as government ID requirements for all social media accounts. It's already begun, to "protect the children." But somehow I'm certain they'll find a loophole for right-wing influencers.

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u/Milesray12 15h ago

The system admins are allowing the Russian misinformation because they’re under Elon’s direction.

Now the algorithm is somewhat normal before Elon’s takeover and the bot flooding that happened shortly after. I see actual people’s posts, no ai bullshit, no right wing bot propaganda, no conspiracy theory nonsense, no AFD, no MAGA.

This should absolutely be documented by democrats, used as a campaign highlight, and made into a legal reality on all platforms going forward.

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u/WhyAreYallFascists 16h ago

A shit load. Comment sections typically full of default_username123, those were down visibly. Everywhere I went on Reddit yesterday. Anecdotal. But still.

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u/south-of-the-river 14h ago

R conservative went quiet for hours

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u/Canadian-Man-infj 12h ago

I'm not disputing this; but, as a Canadian, I just want to point out that it's Thanksgiving weekend here.

There are a lot of conservatives in Canada and multiple "Conservative" parties. That could also be a factor, as Canadian-conservatives were celebrating with family/friends and having large dinner-parties and dinners.

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u/Minimum-Dare301 15h ago

I’m seeing less volume of traffic in r/conservative

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u/Last_Cod_998 13h ago

Ukraine knocked out three Yandex data centers and the internet decided Kremlin troll farms died with them. We checked Russia's networks: only Yandex went dark

Since October 8, Ukrainian drones have hit three Yandex data centers in Ryazan, Kaluga and Vladimir regions. Yandex confirmed several modules were "completely disabled". Search, Yandex Go, payments and cloud services went down across Russia and parts of Central Asia.

Then a Cloudflare chart went viral: bot traffic from Yandex's network dropped to almost zero on October 11. The conclusion online: Kremlin troll farms and pro-AfD, pro-MAGA bot accounts went silent. Today Zelensky repeated it in Warsaw, saying it became "a little easier to breathe" on social media.

That chart measures automated requests to websites coming from Yandex's own network. Most of it is Yandex's search engine crawler, which is why 99.6% of that traffic counts as "bot" in the first place. Knock out the data center and the crawler goes quiet. Even @antibot4navalny, one of the best known trackers of Russian bot networks, says it has "little to do" with propaganda bots on social media.

So we checked where troll farms would actually run: Russia's big mobile and broadband providers. Rostelecom, MTS, Beeline, MegaFon and Russia as a whole all show normal bot traffic this week, almost identical to the week before. No drop after the strikes. MegaFon was even slightly up on October 11 and 12.

The strikes hit Yandex hard. But there's no data showing Russian disinformation went quiet. Caveat: Cloudflare only sees requests to websites behind Cloudflare, not posts on X or TikTok.

Original post with all sources here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Res\\_Publica\\_DE/s/tuMMbUuZ4e

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u/cats_catz_kats_katz 15h ago

Their plans are to take the hit on Q4 earnings calls due to sudden user drop, do we think anything otherwise?

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u/Oblachko_O 14h ago

That is not a work of sys admin to filter out bot traffic. Why? Because they don't decide if bot traffic is legit or not. This should come from the management if such measures are needed. You could also develop means to prevent bot traffic, but again, all decisions come from the management. All others may only suggest but not enforce such measures to exist.

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u/HomelandersBane 14h ago

Many voices on /conservatives were silent. All damn day.

Wonder why?

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u/Devils_Advocate-69 14h ago

I guess the big name daily posters who were quiet that day would be good to look into

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u/KeyMyBike 13h ago

Their plans are to flag every single account that stopped making posts and give them all immunity. So when people are reporting them for death threats and the like Reddit doesn't do anything.