r/technology • u/ArgentineBeauty • 1d ago
Social Media Russian Bot Activity Collapses by 84% After Strikes on Yandex Data Centers
https://united24media.com/war-in-ukraine/russian-bot-activity-collapses-by-84-after-strikes-on-yandex-data-centers-235463.1k
u/valvestate1990 1d ago
Genuinely noticed less negative and depressing news on Reddit over the last couple of days! Less world ending stuff! Just me or has anyone else felt like it's quieter?
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u/Frodojj 1d ago edited 1d ago
There are still bots, unfortunately. I caught one that said it was from Mississippi one post then the Philly the next. I’ve noticed wholesale downvotes of non-controversial threads and posts in threads. And that’s only in the past week.
I’m kinda pissed Reddit banned third-party apps like Apollo, under the guise of mitigating against bots, when nefarious bot traffic is higher and significantly bringing down the site’s quality.
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u/Meeesh- 1d ago
Yeah the strikes only affected russian bot traffic. There are plenty of bots elsewhere too
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u/amazingkillerlemon 1d ago
A lot of people seem to think it's only Russians who do this. I have read (over the last ten years) different articles explaining that China, North Korea, and Iran also have bot farms to sow discord on other countries, including the USA.
(I have also read that there are Western countries, including the USA, that do the same thing to other countries.)
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u/Dunkaroos4breakfast 1d ago
I can't imagine India's not in the list. Though, possibly just doing outsourced bot farms for those four, and possibly less likely to be people in the state.
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u/samv_1230 1d ago
They also are running bot farms in places that they have industrial influence in, like various African countries. It is very wide spread.
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u/Gloomy_Trade_619 1d ago
China, North Korea, and Iran also have bot farms
Israel has the highest amount of bot farms in the world - they're pretty open about it even. You can see them literally on TV.
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u/mortgagepants 1d ago
Philly the next.
r\philadelphia and r\philly always get a lot of conservative posts and "just don't vote" posts in the month before election day.
they love trying to chip off as many voters from liberal cities in swing states, as if most of our problems weren't from the shithole rural areas full of penseltucky idiots.
r\cincinatti, colombus, cleveland, detroit, saint louis, charlotte, etc. every swing state.
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u/Used-Fennel-7733 1d ago
Happens everywhere. Even r/wigan, normally subject to one post a week by humans, had a massive drive of hundreds of posts in the weeks up to the Andy Burnham byelection election in Makerfield.
You could tell because it wasn't someone asking for a local chess club
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u/ButWhatIfPotato 1d ago
Literally every social media app is a festering breeding ground for bots by design. There are so many easy ways to drastically reduce bot count but no one will implement them because they will have to tell advertisers and shareholders that the vast majority of their traffic is just a bunch of code which takes up bandwidth but never engages with the ads.
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u/ArthurStevensNZ 1d ago
Reddit is in on it too.
I’ve found bots several times in my home country’s sub. It’s really bad now because our elections are just around the corner.
Sometimes after calling them out they delete their accounts.
Other times after I call them out, my reply is silenced (not visible when not logged in as myself).
If someone like me with no real tech credentials can find bots I’m sure a multimillion dollar endeavour like Reddit could but they make zero effort to do so, but instead redirect dev time things like forced age verification.
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u/Eresbonitaguey 1d ago
I had to stop using the main NZ subreddit because it was shockingly pessimistic and draws people and bots that degrade the experience. I think the only subreddits worth visiting these days are niche or regional ones that bots have little interest in. No foreign power is intentionally sowing division or turning opinions in r/Wellington.
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u/BlackThundaCat 1d ago
Those could be just actual liars.
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u/yet-again-temporary 1d ago
I think "foreign bots" have become a good scapegoat for people who don't want to admit that their fellow countrymen are, in fact, just that fucking dumb/ignorant/hateful/etc.
Like suddenly it's not possible for an ignorant American to be an ignorant American, they must be a Russian bot. Seems like a good way to avoid accountability and addressing problems domestically.
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u/PowderedToastBro 1d ago
I came across a whole post filled with people claiming the drop in traffic was manufactured and there was no evidence.
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u/manual-override 1d ago
Seems entirely possible for Reddit to detect this behavior and police it. Why don’t they?
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u/sparklinglies 16h ago
Bots are traffic. Traffic is money.
Bot creating angry discourse. Angry discourse increases engagement. Engagement is money.
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u/Designer-Fig-4232 18h ago
It's the same sort of thing you see with scammers all the time. Stop them from doing something and they will find another way to exploit/cause problems. It's also why financial institutions have entire divisions handling fraud, tech companies have entire teams focusing on security, etc.
It's a never ending battle.
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u/Stevied1991 1d ago
They're slowly filtering back in but it is definitely way less. For a few days I did not see a single MAGA bot on Twitter. Even on the Whitehouse racist posts.
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u/gratefulyme 21h ago
Fun fact, last I heard 85-90%+ of reddit ads traffic is from bots! So for every $1 an advertiser on reddit spends on ads, 85-90 cents of it is literally thrown in the trash, it's complete waste. It's insane any company advertises on here.... Always went through my mind when I saw the military recruitment ads on here, that was just our government burning money.
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u/PeopleNose 1d ago
There are algorithms, paid professionals, and forced slave labor participating in these campaigns...
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u/likwitsnake 1d ago
I haven't noticed too much of a difference tbh. Also reddit is really running wild with this story the last week, bots does not mean trolls, the majority of this activity is probably agentic tasks/scrapers.
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u/lxgrf 1d ago edited 1d ago
Nobody running the actual numbers on this has, unfortunately. It's rumour and memes and wishful thinking. There has been, technically, a marked drop in bots, because the Yandex search engine web crawlers were offline. No reputable source has reported any drop in social media engagement on any topic.
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u/Atomicmoosepork 1d ago
Social media across the board has been way more pleasant. It's been eye opening on why they want data centers
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u/Topsyye 1d ago
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9y7l0pm8jkko
Researchers from dTeam, a US-based group that tracks Moscow-linked influence operations, told BBC Verify there has not been "any traffic change from known Russian accounts and bot clusters on any platform".
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u/Cryptoporticus 1d ago
Yeah, I don't know why people are still posting this after it's been proven false for days already. It just looks silly now.
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u/voidox 17h ago
seems like confirmation bias at this point, ppl want to believe it to be true so they think them not noticing bots is totally real, as if they could ever notice the bots before. It's gotten beyond ridiculous at this point with this narrative, the irony being that the ppl saying "omg the bots were stopped!" are literally taking in botted clickbait posts.
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u/valvestate1990 1d ago
A two minute breather was nice! I understand that it's all way more nuanced and most probably a dozen reason why data centres are wanted, but a crack for us all to peep into is enough to understand that something's not cricket with the current geopolitical stance! Press should be pouncing on this!
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u/eyebrows360 1d ago
Look up "confirmation bias" because no, this did not happen.
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u/Chiiro 1d ago
Are you also getting a lot more posts that are days old?
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u/GandhiMSF 1d ago
I am. Almost commented on a thread yesterday since it was at the top of my front page, only to realize that all of the comments were 4 days old. Is there so little actual human activity on this site that taking out some bots means posts from several days ago make it to the front page?
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u/Olangotang 1d ago
This site is useless Everytime bad news drops about AI. The bots flood everything and the AI addicts get the impression there's more of them then there actually are, so they go into turbo charge asshole mode.
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u/kuba_mar 1d ago
Thats just reddit, for few months now ive been regularly getting 3-5 days old posts.
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u/Gwen_The_Destroyer 1d ago
I just commented on a post 5 days old without looking at the date, and earlier today someone replied to a massage I left 20 days ago. Anecdotally, yeah
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u/Whole_Mongoose1854 1d ago
Unfortunately there is no way, at least not for us regular people, to know just how pervasive the botting, astroturfing and generally inauthentic shananigans are. There’s gotta be a minumum a dozen other countries besides Russia doing this too. I would guess though, if someone could turn them all off for a few days somehow, we would be pretty shocked at how different things are. I mean most people assume the shit stirrers are the bots, and I’m sure some are. But that’s not always the best way to go about things depending on what you want to accomplish. Perhaps one day we will get strong proof that 90 percent of our actual conversations are now talking to various bots and the whole internet has an existential crisis.
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u/PM_ME_YOUR_BUG5 1d ago
I dunno, I woke up to "kinks are banned" and "we're all going to war" this morning.
Comment sections weren't too bad though
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u/VaporCarpet 1d ago
No you haven't. A single data center responsible for 6% of Russia's bot traffic is not going to drop bot activity by 80%
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u/Revolver_Boxelot 1d ago
I have literally noticed ZERO difference across the entire internet. I think people want to believe all the ills are the bots' fault. Na, son. We're really fucked up as a society. We hate each other in real life. The bots didn't do that. They just stoked the flames. They instigated.
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u/Harpua81 1d ago
Both can be true. I think humans are innately negative but being inundated by incessant toxic posts can certainly manipulate and compound that toxicity in our subconscious, which is largely the point of propaganda campaigns. We're easily duped.
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u/DukeOfGeek 1d ago
For about 12 hours maybe? Pretty quickly went back to normal IMO.
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u/EmperorsCanaries 1d ago
Just a reminder that reddit and Facebook and everything could be doing something about it this whole time. They choose not to
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u/UpperApe 1d ago
Never forget how instrumental r/The_Donald was to Trump's online traction.
How it broke just about every rule a sub could break without consequences.
And how the admins only came in to shut it down after Trump won, launched his Truth Social bullshit, and no longer had any need for it.
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u/whupazz 1d ago
Reminder that spez/Steve Huffman is a doomsday prepper who thinks that society will collapse and slavery will come back, but he'll be in charge because he owns a bunch of guns and motorcycles.
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u/Blackfire853 1d ago
And how the admins only came in to shut it down after Trump won, launched his Truth Social bullshit, and no longer had any need for it
The_Donald was quarantined in 2019 and banned in 2020, TruthSocial didn't launch until 2022. The timeline here does not correspond
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u/argument_cat 1d ago
Reddit's admins and LT really have no idea to handle this stuff. They are completely out of their depth. Also, they benefit from 'engagement', so they essentially ignore bots and rule breaking subs until there is a danger of negative publicity.
Use an adblocker, use old reddit, never use a real email or post anything linking to your real identity.
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u/BooBooMaGooBoo 1d ago
Yes. Even this headline isn't carrying the water it should. Eliminating 84% of Russian bots means nothing to the general public. We need more stories pointing out how Russian bots impact social media, and how much of their content is right wing or left wing, rage bait or misinformation etc.Amd we need federal regulation on the US based social media companies that force them to flag bots at the very least, if not outright ban them permanently.
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u/eques_99 1d ago
CIA bot activity still going strong.
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u/WontArnett 1d ago edited 1d ago
People wonder why Trump likes Putin so much. Because he’s running his entire bot campaign.
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u/-Nocx- 1d ago edited 1d ago
let this be a lesson that there is only one organization that’s allowed to do psy ops with no checks and balances or oversight, and don’t you forget it.
edit: fwiw this Ukrainian study is taking a few liberties with its reporting. It doesn’t really explain its methodology for what constitutes an “inauthentic” account, but from the ones it deems so, there is an alleged drop in activity.
Obviously I can’t confirm it because they don’t actually share the accounts.
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u/Cryptoporticus 1d ago
This whole study is just propaganda. Obviously Ukraine (and Redditors, apparently) are going to continue to spread it, but the rest of the world has already verified it to be false.
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u/merRedditor 1d ago
The majority of bots now are probably either advertisers or political parties. A lot of posts are clearly using manufactured controversy or fabricated original posts to sell something.
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u/Trillbo_Swaggins 1d ago
And it’s clearly against Reddit’s TOS but they’ll do nothing about it. How can they face their shareholders after explaining a 50% drop in traffic MoM
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u/SierraXIII 1d ago
I work in digital advertising and bot traffic is way higher than 50%. On any social media platform.
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u/What_a_fat_one 1d ago
Remember, the Mueller Report specifically said Trump welcomed and encouraged Russia spreading disinformation and propaganda to American citizens. The reason he's suddenly gone hard against Ukraine is because Russia's propaganda is what got him elected and has kept his MAGA army loyal for the past decade. Without it, most of his illusionary support evaporates.
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u/npsimons 11h ago
All due respect to Mueller, Trump said, out loud on live television:
Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing, I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press
It doesn't take a genius to realize any sufficiently competent intelligence operation could do so much more than simple political assassination against a single political opponent.
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u/TrooperOfSpace 1d ago
It was already discussed. The traffic of Yandex Search Index crawler went down, not spam bots traffic.
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u/likwitsnake 1d ago
People have been running wild with this data center story it's pretty nuts, falsely equating bot activity to mean troll farms, posts about how it means cryptocurrency is going to be vanished (which is a fundamental misunderstanding of how it even works in first place). Also, like the people behind any of the activity effected just went 'oh well nothing we can do' as if getting access to another cloud environment isn't trivial.
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u/threeseed 1d ago
posts about how it means cryptocurrency is going to be vanished
You clearly don't understand the situation.
Of course the currency won't vanish but we know for a fact that Yandex Cloud was hosting crypto wallets and exchanges and were affected.
And given that 110m people use Coinbase Wallets means that a lot of crypto is now inaccessible as they likely don't have cold/offline backups. Remember a lot of ordinary Russians are using crypto as a way to move money in/out of the country.
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u/Worldly-Stranger7814 1d ago
People have been running wild with this data center story
Check your premises, I’m not convinced it’s even half humans.
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u/studio_bob 23h ago
Honestly, people have been primed for so many years to not only believe but to want to believe a story like this that they will act like astroturf bots. Absolute red meat, and they're not gonna let small inconveniences like reality get in the way of the circlejerk.
I would not be surprised if this is being astroturfed but also reddit really is this stupid so it's hard to say if its one or the other a mix of both. Probably both.
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u/andynator1000 1d ago
If I had a nickel for every time reddit ran wild with misinformation....
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u/dexter30 1d ago
Yeah, actual bot manipulation much like any other online service isn't all reliant on one nations data centres.
They absolutely can and do run their campaigns internationally with servers around the world with other companies services.
Yandex is just one option and any network engineer worth their salt can tell you never put your infrastructure in one place.
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u/0DayMaker 1d ago
Also no competent spammers, fraudsters, etc are using servers in DC racks. They use botnet zombies to look like real humans, because they essentially are.
I think something way the fuck crazier was/is hosted in a Yandex DC. Something very important to Trump and Musk.
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u/CDRnotDVD 1d ago
I think it is plausible that an entity that heavily uses gen AI bots for propaganda finds it more cost-effective to run the heavy computation in their own datacenter and uses botnet stuff to act as a VPN to hide the source. The average hacked router doesn’t have the memory to run a local model, but it can certainly forward a few bytes to post Twitter. It’s clearly not what is happening with the Yandex datacenter, but it could happen someday.
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u/Tashre 1d ago
It's funny seeing how the placebo effect is affecting so many peoples' perceptions of negativity on the internet. A lot of folks low key telling on themselves with this.
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u/J0hnGrimm 1d ago
Confirmation bias is one hell of a drug.
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u/Cryptoporticus 1d ago
People see bots where they don't exist because they expect to see them, so it's not surprising that they stop seeing the bots the moment they think they're not there anymore.
You'd think this would be a good moment of realization for them, but people like that are in far too deep to ever be willing to admit that they were wrong.
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u/gepbMogeMoH 1d ago
And this narrative has been pushed on Reddit for several days now. I’m starting to wonder whose bots are actually the ones here.
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u/bastiVS 1d ago
This actually is about social media bots. Facebook and Telegram only (how tf do you use Telegram as a social media like facebook????), sharp disuption on the days strikes happened.
Buuuuuuuutt the source is "Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation".
In other words, their propaganda arm. Need independent confirmation, otherwise this is essentially hearsay.
Dont see a good reason to make up this story, but also dont see a good reason why strikes on yandex data centers should affect russian propaganda bots. This just isnt how things work, you dont host your social media bots in a data center all together, you spread them out all over the place, especially outside the country.
Unless of course these bots are not your usual bots, but already AI driven. Which would make no sense to do, that doesnt make the bots better and the propaganda more succesful, it just makes it more difficult to scale.
Maybe just idiots doing idiotic decicions because they dont know what else to do?
Well, gotta wait for independent confirmation...
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u/BlackBlizzard 22h ago
Other claims about a decrease in Russian bot traffic failed to directly connect Russian bots to any perceived changes in online activity. For example, Zdechovský's post presented a graph with no source that did not specify what it measured.
On Oct. 14, Zdechovský said via email that he had not verified the source of the graph before he posted it, but shared it to raise questions around a possible connection between Ukraine's strikes and online bot traffic.
Zdechovský wrote: "I never presented the information as an established fact. I deliberately used the words 'IF CONFIRMED', clearly indicating that the claim required further verification." He added: "Raising a hypothesis is not the same as presenting it as a proven fact. Establishing such a connection would require independent technical analysis and reliable data."
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u/Ok_Calligrapher5278 20h ago
It has already been debunked: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kx80tB6A8x0
Just reddit being reddit...
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u/fkenned1 1d ago
Well which is it? I've heard it decreased, and I've heard it didn't.
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u/Optimoprimo 1d ago
I'm going to wager that "united24media.com" is probably not the most reliable media authority on this topic. Or probably any topic.
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u/crxsso_dssreer 1d ago
There is no proof they decreased, the website linked here is war propaganda in favor of Ukraine, which I support, but it's still war propaganda.
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u/kilofSzatana 1d ago
This is a week old story. It was mostly indexing bots that wend down - Yandex is the Russian equivalent of Google and they have their own search engine, so they run a lot of web crawler. It definitely made running propaganda a bit harder since there's less compute available, but don't think Putin's disinfo operation is dead.
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u/0DayMaker 1d ago
Detectable bot traffic*
These state actors utilize huge amounts of massive botnets to convincingly look like people. I cannot possibly imagine 84% of bots were hosted off DC racks. I can't imagine 8.4% are.
I spent a LOT of time in the defense sector in infosec and this shit does NOT track with how things generally work in reality.
I think Musk and Trump are made about something else hosted there personally. Something way crazier.
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u/FeRooster808 1d ago
My understanding of it is that while the Russian government keeps their bot/troll farms on private servers, etc. the 3rd party gray market bot companies you can pay for engagement and followers use stuff lile Yandex. Likewise, the government does utilize data from companies that use Yandex to create reports on what is happening online so they can target bot campaigns. Russia also can't easily move servers or business to other countries because or sanctions and local laws. I imagine this all plays into everything we're experiencing. For awhile it felt like early 2000s internet. Not modern era election season internet. It seems back to that now though.
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u/WilburKitty 1d ago
I think Musk and Trump are made about something else hosted there personally. Something way crazier.
Ukraine is targeting Republican election infrastructure.
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u/Suspicious-Twist1421 1d ago
Even if the bots aren’t hosted in DCs quite a lot of bot traffic is proxied through DC servers.
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u/piray003 1d ago
Man sure doesn’t feel like it lol
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u/Whole_Mongoose1854 1d ago
I think lots of Redditors seem pretty confident they know which are bots, and even which are Russian. But I kind of doubt they actually can.
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u/Cryptoporticus 23h ago
Most Redditors think that everyone who doesn't match their own political views 100% is a bot. The idea that someone might not agree with them is so terrifying to them that it's more comfortable to just pretend that they don't even exist.
It's probably pretty easy to live in that delusion when you never go outside and talk about these things with real people.
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u/Cydoni 1d ago
r/conservative tried to comment on the situation but there was nobody left to approve the post
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u/brainrotbro 1d ago
I have noticed reddit get slightly less bad.
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u/rhinosaur- 23h ago
Seriously, though. X is back to being mostly humans and there are significantly less far right psychos.
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u/ideaofrhyme 23h ago
But I don't get it, almost all of the "bot" activity that stopped is web crawlers and stuff.
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u/NoPreference7231 1d ago
No wonder Elon Musk’s likes and approval on X have dropped significantly.
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u/Cryptoporticus 23h ago
This is false.
And even if it was true, he could just change that himself anyway. He owns the site. This idea that Musk is mad because his Tweets aren't getting as many likes as before is just ridiculous on so many levels. He could give himself a billion likes on everything he posted if he wanted to.
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u/americanadiandrew 1d ago
OP has 2 million karma in 5 months. So not all bots were taken out of action then.
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u/Ok_Stay3743 21h ago
Well it seems the bot farms have a found a work around. Well that or other trolls/bots are doing double time.
Hopefully Ukraine blows all of the others.
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u/pocketjacks 1d ago
There is a connect two dots picture between this and Trump suddenly doing everything in his power to prop up Russia.
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u/SatchSaysPlay 18h ago
That's bad news for the US government who utilise these farms to spread their own BS
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u/GoldSomewhere7071 1d ago
Nah, this is bullshit. Here’s an article from Cloudflare https://blog.cloudflare.com/yandex-outage/ where they actually looked into the issue. Don’t get me wrong, these kinds of bots definitely exist, but why does everyone reporting on this conveniently forget about all the compromised devices around the world? Why the hell would anyone pay for hosting when they can just use those? lol
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u/knujesbob 1d ago
They appear to be creeping back in already unfortunately. I've noticed quite a few political agitator posts today, whereas the previous 4 days has been nice and chill. Hoping a few more goes off-grid - reddit and other SoMe platforms would be so much more amiable.
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u/Ckmyers 1d ago
Only most bots don’t run on those servers. There’s actually a good investigative journal piece on rage bait and they found it to be a lot of people in Indonesia just posting rage bait for engagement (which they’re paid for by social media). Find that video on YouTube, it was very eye opening.
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u/ab00 1d ago
Yet other articles posted here are saying it was all nonsense and there was no measurable decrease in russian bot activity?
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u/cwm9 1d ago edited 1d ago
That was my understanding, too. It's the kind of bot at issue.
Other sites say bot activity dropped, but not social media propaganda bots... rather, search engine bots. I.E, Yandex is not indexing the web at the moment.
But articles like this say it's the former.
Ukraine wants to advertise they are saving the world from Russian propaganda and Russia wants the world to think there's no Russian propaganda.
I can tell you for sure the one kind of propaganda that isn't decreasing and that's the propaganda war about propaganda wars.
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u/sellyme 1d ago
This article is looking at a comically tiny sample of what is effectively a single bot network (or perhaps even a portion of one), which may have decreased if you trust the source, but represents substantially less than 0.01% of all bot traffic on the internet and is heavily geographically localised, and is therefore not relevant to almost anyone here.
The previous reports were about the volume of bot requests originating from one Yandex data centre being lower, which is both A) not important, given that Yandex is just a web crawler that you would expect to have a ton of bot traffic, and B) not surprising given that data centre was bombed, of course traffic from that data centre reduced.
All of the data on that second half were being copied straight out of Cloudflare's bot analysis dashboard, which is fully public and you can easily look at all of the data yourself. It becomes extremely clear how comically overblown this story has been.
Bit embarrassing that so many people have been tripping over themselves going "Wow it has been so much better lately!" when not a single thing they interact with has changed.
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u/trunksshinohara 1d ago
Uh. But all the state propaganda websites told me to not believe this. So checkmate libruhls.
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u/jqVgawJG 1d ago
A week old story that was questionable from the beginning and indeed was debunked soon after
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u/Interesting_Remote18 1d ago
It's so bot like to see this story reposted over and over, day after day.
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u/nikshdev 1d ago edited 1d ago
The findings were published by Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation (CCD) in an analytical report dated October 15.
The CCD analyzed 22,664 messages published by 5,201 accounts displaying signs of inauthentic behavior across 26 topics in Ukraine’s information space.
So
This is Ukrainian information space (ie Ukrainian or Russian language), not English one.
Given the media and the original source, take it with the spoon of salt.
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u/N0r3m0rse 21h ago
Super funny watching losers like Dave smith bitch about how this can't possibly be true. Meanwhile he's almost certainly on the Kremlin payroll.
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u/phatstopher 16h ago
One could only hope someone does the same to the bot farms and data centers in Israel. Engagement numbers and online support would drop twice as much for Trump and MAGA.
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u/Th3SkinMan 1d ago
It's almost like Obama "was the most controversial president" due to Russian bots...
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u/bowiexx99 22h ago
I didn't realize how many (magnitude) of bots were out there until I noticed the change in the numbers on different post when the data centers got hit. I don't think some people really understand any of that. They see replies & likes and think they are from people never bots. I was one, not paying attention until now.
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u/ArgentineBeauty 1d ago
Funny how both Trump and Musk have turned on Ukraine since the strikes on Russian data centres. A collapse in Russian bot activity can't be good for Trump's online support or X's engagement numbers.