I think everyone hopped on this viral misunderstanding and run with it without verifying. The lower bot activity reported by Cloudflare is related to Yandex search engine crawler bots, not propaganda bots.
It would a super rookie mistake to route social media bots through Russian IP's, they would instantly get flagged. Other than biased anecdotes, there's no data that shows lower propaganda bot activity. An X bot monitoring account confirms this
"Lower bot activity" is inclusive of all kinds, including propaganda bots.
Other than biased anecdotes
Lmao, lol even. Go post on twitter right now about Russia shooting down Flight MH-17 or raping their way through Bucha and it'll be crickets. A month ago you'd have been mobbed by denials and other nonsense.
I wish I could send Budanov flowers for doing more in the service of a fair US midterm election than, apparently, anyone within the US could have accomplished.
is inclusive of all kinds, including propaganda bots.
This isn't a semantics gotcha, Cloudflare's quoted graph doesn't track social media bot activity. It only charts automated HTTP requests (aka bots aka crawlers) from a specific search engine (Yandex in this case). That's how the Internet is indexed.
Social media bots use residential IP proxies (likely from hacked routers/IoT devices) to circumvent flagging. They will have a totally different IP fingerprint from what that Cloudflare graph is tracking.
Is it possible that some bot farms used Yandex infrastructure to host their servers? Yes. Can we use the Cloudflare chart to prove it? No
Yeah, I cannot prove the effect or the correlation, but I have genuinely seen a complete falloff of certain types of posts and comments across social media. Not just propaganda related, all the engagement and algorithm baiting stuff just vanished. Even the Mr Beast gambling website reply bots are gone.
Maybe, by sheer coincidence, social media or cloudflare updated their algorithms around the same time. It's genuinely not impossible.
lmao, lol even. Go post on twitter right now about Russia shooting down Flight MH-17 or raping their way through Bucha and it'll be crickets. A month ago you'd have been mobbed by denials and other nonsense.
Source: your ass
Brother even RFE is calling out the bullshit on this.
33
u/georgejetsonn 5d ago
I think everyone hopped on this viral misunderstanding and run with it without verifying. The lower bot activity reported by Cloudflare is related to Yandex search engine crawler bots, not propaganda bots.
It would a super rookie mistake to route social media bots through Russian IP's, they would instantly get flagged. Other than biased anecdotes, there's no data that shows lower propaganda bot activity. An X bot monitoring account confirms this