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I don't know a single domain expert that thinks there is some effect from the Yandex strikes on social media troll activity. Another very qualified voice weighs in here.

Kate Starbird@katestarbird.bsky.social

Y’all, I hate to rain on the dead bot parade, but the Yandex data center destruction doesn’t seem to have significantly impacted social media bots. I made temporal graphs of X posts about AfD around the time of the attack and there’s no sign of a sudden dip or residual impact on that conversation.

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So all those pseudo news accounts and social media postings about Tucker Carlson losing 70% of his followers on social media were just made up by wishful thinking leftists?

I was wondering this morning, does the activity of making fake posts actually demand a great deal of computing power in the first place? I understand that it takes a lot of "compute" to make a fake video, but maybe that isn't true for posting simple rage-bait texts and replies.

Yes. This work is globally distributed, often in poor countries, and is done on a piece-work basis by low-wage workers. Datacenters have little to do with the process.

And it's being run from other countries by piece-worker freelancers. Datacenters largely not relevant to this activity.

I monitor several public accounts on FB that always get dozens and dozens of gross comments. 2 trans people. 2 immigrant support accounts. 2 elected Dems. There has been a marked decrease in the gross comments. Under 10 instead of dozens. Maybe a coincidence but hard to ignore.

One underlaying question remains anyway: Bots or Trolls? What I gather from the counter-data is bot-analysis, not trolls. OTOH, also, even if the effect is defacto just 1%, while the perception is 10/25/50%, it would still not hurt to cheer the Ukrainian target list, have them take out more DC's.

It's truly mad how upwardly viral this is still continuing to be. I can see how some folks trying to fact-check are getting confused, there are a few articles out there that seem full of valid citations & references -- but poke at them with a stick or run them by a competent nerd & they fall apart.

We went in a more scientific direction, starting with the assertion that the burden of proof lies on those claiming a direct effect. A plausible hypothesis, but requires evidence. After analyzing hundreds of sources and posts, we have found none. russianbots.america2.news

russianbots.america2.newsThe Russian Bot Collapse Report: did Russia's bots really go quiet?A sourced, live check on the viral claim that Ukraine's strikes on Yandex data centers silenced Russian social-media bots: what the data measures, what it doesn't, and who is spreading which claims.