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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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