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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:

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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.

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    @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.
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    @dalias @txtx

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