Despite multiple Ukrainian strikes hitting Yandex servers in Russia, a thread by antibot4navalny, which has long tracked state-sponsored social media campaigns and troll farms, explains that the Cloudflare “Bot Traffic” chart many people have cited is really about automated web crawlers operated by Yandex accessing the web.
It’s not connected to “bots” posting on social media, and Russian bot/crawler traffic overall continues to be about the same as normal. Still, are you noticing any difference in the posts and comments you’ve seen online?
[Media: https://bsky.app/profile/antibot4navalny.bsky.social/post/3mxmv7t6nxc27]
You know, I don’t believe there are so many Russian bots astroturfing the Internet. There are plenty of regular humans who truly believe Russia is doing nothing but defend itself, in “aggressive NATO expansion”, and a whole generally anti-West attitude.
They hate America for being an imperialist power, which… Yeah. Absolutely. But then in the same breath state Russia isn’t, and that they’re nothing more than a victim of said Imperialism.
Consider this an anecdote, but I have family who says these things. Bots need not apply.
They aren’t meant to be the star of the show. Their purpose is to be in the crowd and agitate. They’re the devil that whispers people’s ear.
Bots would have proven to the a failure if a botnet went down and culture wars vanished. Their intention is to manipulate people. Not to wholesale substitute to the population.
Besides the name itself seems to go over heads. Bot farms don’t operate out of a centralized server. They’re not even bots literally. These operations are farmed out to locations around the world. Sometimes they’re real human trolls.
But there don’t need to be trolls, or people deliberately put there by Russia to spread propaganda. There are plenty of people that already do this out of their own accord. Mostly the kind that also believe in other dumb things.
Honestly Russia might not need to bot anymore, but with a few bribed content creators and some incendiary alternative takes and a lot of bot accounts you can do a lot of damage.
The point isn’t to astroturf the internet, it’s to guide it in the right direction for people to harbor conspiratorial bullshit like that. It’s like pushing a ball down a slope lightly, the gravity at some point adds way more force than you could have.