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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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  • 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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