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]
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.