Is it possible some of the coordinated inauthentic activity / influence campaigns on social media relied on Yandex? Sure. Is there evidence of it? Not that I've seen, and even if it were, it's unlikely that whatever parts of the campaign did would be hard to migrate elsewhere
RE: https://masto.ai/@meduza_en/117429716848502644
As skeptical as I am of the reports so far, it's worth a try. For science!
https://mastodon.social/@meduza_en@masto.ai/117429716954780655
Le Parisien cites (without linking) the post with an unsourced chart by Tomas Zdechovsk* and a post by Timothy Snyder** which contains no actual data or analysis
* https://mastodon.social/@reedmideke/117424546271171453
** https://archive.ph/8EKx1
Hromadske covers the distinction between cloudflare "bots" and social media influence "bots" well, and reports no confirmed decline in the latter. They do note "German technology outlet Rohtext, cited by Ukrainian publication NV, said it had not established a connection between the data center strikes and the reported decline. It also noted that online activity surrounding other German political parties had fallen over the weekend"
The Rohtext report echoes my complaints about the AfD chart (unsourced, unknown criteria), and additionally notes it appears to show data from in the future relative to when it was posted. Their analysis (using grok 😬) shows mentions of all parties declining without AfD particularly standing out, but as they note is not directly comparable to the unknown criteria of the other chart, and doesn't cover enough time to tell if a drop around weekend is normal
https://rohtext.de/news/afd-bots-offline-yandex-angriffen-was-virale
#Bots #Yandex
antibot4navalny finds no clear impact on pro-Kremlin trolls
https://bsky.app/profile/antibot4navalny.bsky.social/post/3mxrlpxb4b22m
Guardian quotes Amil Khan of Valent "Our platforms are still monitoring Russian social networks across the world and there is no discernible change in their posting patterns … Yandex datacentres have no practical connection to social media bot farms" and also fedi's own @rysiek with a succinct explanation of the different kinds of "bot"
BBC cites dTeam (who have surprisingly little web presence I could find, but were credited in Clemson's Matryoshka investigation) saying they have not seen "any traffic change from known Russian accounts and bot clusters on any platform" and notes Storm-1516 and Matryoshka are as active as ever
Kyiv Independent reports "the Disinformation Analysis Center at Poland's state-run Research and Academic Computer Network (NASK) recorded no significant decrease in activity by disinformation accounts between Sept. 30 and Oct. 11" among other sources reporting no significant change