First, why should you give me the time of day? :bear_shrug: Despite being Japanese, USian, and Indigenous North-American, Eastern European geopoli is a special interest of mine :frog_blush:

So I've been watching and hearing various things about Russia's bot traffic from "down 99%" (technically true but that's mostly scrapers, not propoganda bots) to "it did nothing" (entirely untrue from various data we have from the last few days) to "people jumped at the 99% down as a way to absolve themselves and their country of supporting regressive, anti-social views" which, while true, paints a distortion of the current sitouation and how RU propognda works.

First and most importantly, RU propoganda works by taking what already exists in a society and amplifying it, not trying to create something from whole cloth. It gives people permission to be installed about holding certain views, bolstering their morale and giving movements a facade of more support than they actually have. Separatist movements that get stroked after a good example of this, and so are wedge issues (usually bigotry). It's usually done by amplifying three voices of those already holding views, by agreeing with them or giving useful idiots' voices more reach.

While we haven't seen a 99% collapse in propoganda bots, neither have we seen no effect despite some reports about the number of posts by Russian outlets. There seems to be a heavy downswing in the views and support non-Russian yet Russia-supportive media, as well as a consistent decrease in Russian bots that bother youtubers who deal with the Russian invasion of Ukraine and other topics inconvenient to the Kremlin.

From what I've been able to piece together, this makes sense: what was hit recently seems to have been infrastructure for Russia's native genAI/LLMs, which is one of the easiest ways for propoganda bots to create massive amounts of low-effort slop.

And no, Russian propaganda bots aren't responsible for all of the strife in other countries, and there will always be a third who wants to kill a second third while the last third is content to watch and do nothing (though I think the proportions are more like a quarter, a quarter, and a half), the decrease in propoganda activity we've seen so far over the last few days will mean that bugotry will get less reach, and unpopular opinions will feel more proportional to their actual support because there will be fewer bots to amplify those fringe views convenient for the Kremlin :eevee_joy:

If you have questions, I'll do my best to answer them :hug_love: (or correct/clarify anything that doesn't make sense, I suppose)

#Politics #Geopolitics #Russia :boosts_ok: