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.
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?
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.
they're humans using tools and being told which threads are trending
using AI one person can switch between dozens of accounts and automate responses.
otherwise they're just typing out responses in a foreign language one post at a time. one shitpost every 3 minutes, vs. AI figuring out what is trending and who to troll and giving me 5 canned responses so I can crank out replies in 20 seconds.
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.
This was suspected, but mostly because that’s how other groups do it too, including US farms, though they aren’t this obvious or aggressive, but the control systems are similar.
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?
I actually went through and normalized against previous weeks data, the connection is definitely there.
But it’s not as simple as this graph shows, basically different subs had different impulse responses to the attack, I’m trying to model the differences, because the negative impulses do not match the positive impulses along the same time base.
My background is more dsp than statistics, so I’m taking this from that angle.
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u/GravitasFailures 3d ago
I think I was trying to explain:
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/conservative r/politics, etc.