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  • Kevin BeaumontGossiTheDog@cyberplace.social
    Oct 13, 2026, 6:36 PM

    RE: hachyderm.io/@evacide/11743496

    The Yandex decrease in threat activity narrative was a nonsense peddled by the Ukrainian government. People confuse legit search engine bots with social media bots.

    Russian propaganda operations don’t run from Yandex. They never have. I deal with them all the time on Mastodon. There was no dip.

    It’s a reminder that wars have propaganda - and the propaganda was coming from Ukraine this time.

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  • Kevin BeaumontGossiTheDog@cyberplace.social
    Oct 13, 2026, 6:46 PM

    If you run a well-established Mastodon server you get armies of automated bots to deal with, they use Mastodon to launder posts into BlueSky via the bridge between networks. This stuff never stopped.

    In this case they use a datacenter in Manchester, UK to do the posts.

    Image attached toot
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  • Alex@rtnVFRmedia Suffolk UKvfrmedia@social.tchncs.de
    Oct 13, 2026, 6:54 PM

    @GossiTheDog in my own living memory I remember being told "eat carrots, they are good for eyesight" - whilst there are benefits to eyesight and general health from eating them, it originated as WW2 propaganda that British pilots could see well at night from being served them in military canteens (when the reality was we had radar)

    People in Britain did not stop fighting WW2 in their heads until around 1987, and even then lingering suspicion about "The Continent" fed into Brexit vote as much as the Russian propaganda..

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  • Santiago, né ? :amiga: 👾santi@gone.lema.org
    Oct 13, 2026, 6:43 PM

    @GossiTheDog I hesitated to say that publicly because people would pile on me and call me a Russian agent for stating the obvious. Like if really all threats came from a known source they wouldn't be that threatening..

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  • LinuxLinux@fairy.id
    Oct 13, 2026, 7:15 PM

    @GossiTheDog

    Yeah... no.

    I work META - yes, it is an evil corporation and if finding a new job were easy, I'd do it.

    But the bots did go down. Facebook has over a billion (1,000,000,000+) members world-wide and a sudden decline was noticeable.

    Speaking of Mastodon, yes, it did go down here too. That scam group, for example, suddenly wasn't able to self-boost themselves (I made a few post about that, see URLs).

    If you or anyone else didn't notice. It's not that Russian bots were not missing. It is that you actually are encountering jerks. They, unfortunately, exist.

    fairy.id/@Linux/11743224576511

    fairy.id/@Linux/11743446844094

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  • Kevin BeaumontGossiTheDog@cyberplace.social
    Oct 13, 2026, 7:18 PM

    @Linux I don’t know what you do about Meta but.. uhm. I’m guessing you don’t have visibility.

    Gaza Verified also isn’t a scam group. There’s a whole infrastructure around it doing vetting. I have users from there in my server. They were and are active. They don’t use Yandex. They use an ISP in Gaza.

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  • LinuxLinux@fairy.id
    Oct 13, 2026, 7:22 PM

    @GossiTheDog

    They're a group who promotes themselves, investigates themselves, and verifies themselves without any independent 3rd party oversight.

    It is a scam and I and others have shared video, photos, screenshots, and even documents, which has been forwarded to law encouragement (not just rant about it here).

    Yandex used a data center which houses other servers - not just Yandex.

    People have witnessed the decline of trolls, hate, and other nonsense. We're seeing the effects in real-time. It is not propaganda!

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  • LinuxLinux@fairy.id
    Oct 13, 2026, 7:25 PM

    @GossiTheDog

    I would argue the propaganda is that Russia was not impacted by this, and all is well. A typical Russian thing to say!

    Again, we're seeing the positive effects in real-time. Few trolls, spam, and general nonsense - world-wide. Not just here or on Facebook.

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  • :blahaj: Why Not Zoidberg? 🦑WhyNotZoidberg@topspicy.social
    Oct 13, 2026, 7:33 PM

    @Linux @GossiTheDog I work at a Swedish Gov agency and we had a VERY noticeable drop in port scans and tries for known vulnerabilities (that we already have patched) for about 8 hours until they increased to the former frequency (but from Google servers this time; Google is usually the backup for these groups).

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  • LinuxLinux@fairy.id
    Oct 13, 2026, 7:38 PM

    @WhyNotZoidberg

    Thanks for sharing and confirming what I and others have noticed.

    Yesterday, after I cleared my work's query backlog, was probably one of the easier days. I work as a "consumer content administrative manager." That's a fancy title to say I deal with other people's nonsense. And while Facebook is never drama-free (ever), you noticed things were not as nasty as they typically can be. Not to say that there was nothing nasty, but less of it — and not nearly as aggressive.

    @GossiTheDog

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  • :blahaj: Why Not Zoidberg? 🦑WhyNotZoidberg@topspicy.social
    Oct 13, 2026, 7:39 PM

    @Linux @GossiTheDog I mean we can see the logs. We're not talking X accounts or downvote bots on Imgur but actual traffic, measurable and visible in our logs. So... Yeah. 100% true. (And of course Sweden is a primary target for Russia, as we always has been).

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  • David Ginndavid@social.piconet.work
    Oct 13, 2026, 7:19 PM

    @GossiTheDog All I could say was the traffic from Yandex had dropped to nothing. Although there is no reason for Russian citizens to access my site at all.

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  • Klaus Frankagowa338@chaos.social
    Oct 13, 2026, 8:52 PM

    @GossiTheDog It wasn't nonsense. Well not entirely at least. It actually correlated with a bunch of interesting things.

    Like there being 8h of not a single post in specific conservative subreddits. Or Truth Social activity turning down more then would be usual.

    Or less new pro-AfD stuff getting pushed on TikTok.

    But yea, I kind expected them to overly hype it. It's way less spectacular then news reports made it sound initially, but it also appears like it's not nothing either.

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  • Maija Koivula ⌘maijanlainen@mementomori.social
    Oct 13, 2026, 9:03 PM

    @GossiTheDog

    I have followed young Finnish leftist female politicians’ FB accounts for two years specifically because of the aggressive reactions and comments they get there and following the Yandex data center going down, simultaneously, across party lines, harrassment dropped by 90 % if you count stuff like haha-emojis on posts regarding austerity measures on disabled children; so I don’t think you are correct here in your thinking at all.

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  • 〽️ɪɢᴜᴇʟ 🔜 GodotFestbitbraindev@mastodon.gamedev.place
    Oct 13, 2026, 9:17 PM

    @GossiTheDog since Yandex is effectively the Russian AWS and most its services are 100% down (see status.yandex.cloud/ru/dashboa), and social media bots rely on such data centers, some impact certainly must be had. Calling it "nonsense" is an overstatement and ignorant of the impact of what such datacenters carry. However, I agree with you: showing charts with no labels or clear descriptions and calling it a day is definitely propaganda at best and stupidity at worst.

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  • Cassandrichdalias@hachyderm.io
    Oct 13, 2026, 9:53 PM

    @GossiTheDog When the major provider of web search, cloud services, machine translation, etc. in your country that's partly cut off from the international internet is experiencing partial outages from having some of their data centers destroyed, that is absolutely going to impact their propaganda operations.

    And in fact people have widely observed it doing just that.

    Focusing in on this silly pedantry about the word "bots" to "WELL ACKSHUALLY...." everyone who's celebrating is asshole behavior.

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  • Cassandrichdalias@hachyderm.io
    Oct 13, 2026, 10:23 PM

    @GossiTheDog I specifically called it "asshole behavior" rather than calling anyone an asshole. Because the behavior is the problem.

    The jumping in to "make a correction" on a topic where you have no evidence one way or the other, but where you're using infosec cred so that people will believe you are the Very Smart Guys and the Stupid Gullible Normies are falling for propaganda.

    In a way that intersects with a power struggle between one of the most evil powers on earth and their victims, and makes folks supporting the latter look foolish.

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  • Cassandrichdalias@hachyderm.io
    Oct 13, 2026, 10:29 PM

    @GossiTheDog I've seen it and it doesn't say anything interesting. It's talking about the silly claims based on Cloudflare "bot" data, which are irrelevant.

    The actual "bot farms" are running on human wetware, but likely involve their operators using all sorts of cloud-based tooling, much of which would run on yandex infrastructure.

    So if people are seeing a big drop in these activities, the natural explanation would be that tooling they use in their workflows is experiencing problems that are interfering with their work.

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  • txtx 🇪🇺txtx@mastodon.social
    Oct 13, 2026, 10:40 PM

    @dalias 'The actual "bot farms" are running on human wetware, but likely involve their operators using all sorts of cloud-based tooling, much of which would run on yandex infrastructure.'

    So......Ukraine hitting Yandex infrastructure has an effect on bot traffic then?

    I can't figure out your previous points. Bots aren't sentient. People run them, on computing infrastructure. Infrastructure explodes, bots aren't running.

    @GossiTheDog

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  • Cassandrichdalias@hachyderm.io
    Oct 13, 2026, 10:51 PM

    @txtx @GossiTheDog The phenomenon of massive-scale inauthentic posting for harassment, manipulation of public opinion, etc. which people widely call "Russian bots" is not the same thing as what you or Cloudflare are calling "bots". Much of it is, or at least historically was, humans following recipes for the false personas they're paid to be presenting.

    Running these operations depends on infrastructure which very plausibly took damage in the strikes. Search, translation, proxies, genAI, ... - whatever they're using.

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  • Kevin BeaumontGossiTheDog@cyberplace.social
    Oct 13, 2026, 11:04 PM

    @dalias @txtx “likely” and “plausibly” are doing heavy lifting, it’s without evidence and essentially just made up thoughts.

    I have thousands of these accounts on my Mastodon server contained and monitored, they’re still active as before. See also:

    Image attached toot
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  • Cassandrichdalias@hachyderm.io
    Oct 13, 2026, 11:06 PM

    @GossiTheDog @txtx So we have:

    - zero hard data for the claim
    - zero hard data against the claim
    - lots of anecdotal support for the claim from people impacted by troll farms in everyday life
    - stupid technically-wrong citation of Clownflare graph that's the center of attention

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  • toolwerebeartoolbear@tech.lgbt
    Oct 14, 2026, 1:12 AM

    @GossiTheDog
    Agreeing to decenter the Cloudflare part, the only other strong claim I see is this:

    > 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".

    This "offices" framing:

    > They added that if the offices of known groups involved in these operations "were in flames then we would see a change".

    That's a conflation of datacenters with offices and I'm not sure why dTeam would need to do that.

    > Bots linked to pro-Kremlin influence operations like Storm-1516 and Matryoshka - both of which BBC Verify has previously reported on - were still active on social media on Tuesday, evidence shared with BBC Verify by dTeam shows.

    I'll assume BBC is cherry picking solely to tie in to their past reporting. But we don't know from the article how extensive the dTeam monitoring is nor what scope of inauthentic behavior they are tracking.

    1/2

    @dalias @txtx

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  • toolwerebeartoolbear@tech.lgbt
    Oct 14, 2026, 1:12 AM

    @GossiTheDog
    I agree with the advice to be cautious about falling for appealing propaganda AND I'm dubious that bombing Yandex datacenters has only had an impact on web crawling (and that that had zero knock on effects). I look forward to more sources with more detail in the coming days. I assume that revealing methodology here is complicated, but I'd like a little more than "[expert group says so]".

    > while calling people names

    Did that happen, though? Maybe you are disagreeing that Cassandrich was calling out the behavior. I see aggressive confrontation, but I don't see ad hominem.

    . . .

    Thank you for advising caution. I probably should have lead with that.
    2/2
    @dalias @txtx

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  • txtx 🇪🇺txtx@mastodon.social
    Oct 13, 2026, 11:44 PM

    @dalias I can't be sure but I get the feeling you're loosely implying that Russian methods require a one-on-one relationship where one Russian bot operator follows a user or two and harasses them?

    Those bot factories can't do their work without massively scraping and analysing comments & articles. They 'hit like, follow and subscribe a billion times a minute to distort algorithms. They orchestrate & pre-generate millions of replies, in many languages.

    All that takes big infrastructure.

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  • Cassandrichdalias@hachyderm.io
    Oct 14, 2026, 12:27 AM

    @txtx No, that is absolutely not what I mean.

    You seem to be trying to say exactly what I'm trying to say: that their operations depend on infrastructure that can be taken down kinetically.

    How much these operations did that, I don't know. But I'm not going to discount reports that they did have a positive effect just because the official source is citing Clownflare's bot traffic graph, which is not a metric for "Russian troll farm activity".

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  • txtx 🇪🇺txtx@mastodon.social
    Oct 14, 2026, 12:34 AM

    @dalias What would be a good metric for Russian troll activity?

    There is no single one. It's always going to be just one facet.

    If Russia was firewalled from the free world's Internet (which it should be), we'd get much closer to 0 Russian bot activity. Even though "Internet traffic" is not a metric for "bot activity", it'd still offer a partial explanation of the result.

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  • Cassandrichdalias@hachyderm.io
    Oct 14, 2026, 12:37 AM

    @txtx That's the thing - if there were metrics, you could hold everyone who's choosing not to block it accountable. Which they don't want you do to, because they profit from it. So the platform owners who might have some meaningful metrics are not going to disclose them. And then all we can go by is personal experience of people who deal with harassment daily.

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  • txtx 🇪🇺txtx@mastodon.social
    Oct 14, 2026, 12:49 AM

    @dalias Isn't this an argument why we *should* analyze and interpret the data that we do have access to? Musk and Zuckerberg aren't going to share what they have, as you said. We have to do some detective work, and that means looking at clues.

    [Well, my solution would be to fully ban X/FB/Tiktok and snip Russia's undersea cables but I guess that's a separate topic...]

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  • Bin ChickenBinChicken@theblower.au
    Oct 14, 2026, 12:45 AM

    @GossiTheDog Thankyou for lending your expertise to clear-up what's going on. It's a good reminder that truth is the first casualty in war.

    Propaganda such as this is often easily disprovable. At best, it provides a boost to morale, though only in the short-term. I think it's not worth it for a bunch of other downsides, including:
    - Offering a false sense of security.
    - Degradation of the signal to noise ratio.
    - Offering plausible deniability or a cover-up for a more serious moral problem with a simple answer.

    I'm not suggesting Ukraine was wrong to target those data centres. If they're a conduit for Russian military intelligence for their invasion of Ukraine, I hope Ukraine boosts their defence by hitting more Yandex data centres.

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