this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2026
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Blowing up data centers will not stop troll farms. Troll traffic is not coming from Yandex.
That's one instance of a troll farm from 11 years ago.
Surely nowadays these troll farms are LLM powered instead of human powered and of course need compute power.
Where the humans sit that orchestrate these bot networks is another topic.
Yeah the idea that they would just route their traffic from a regular office network connection is truly stupid.
They will be using data center compute to generate the traffic, but proxy it through residential proxies and other compromised devices that form a botnet.
Central generation with remote access for the trolls, and distributed outbound traffic.
Where is the lion's share of LLM compute located?
I don't know about that.
Feels like there's a high risk of the LLM going off script and going against the points they are trying to make.
Just like Trump's AI site saying the 2020 election was not stolen.
Do you not see that daily? There's nothing internally consistent or coherent about 3/4 of what bots post, it's just garbage that sounds plausibly human.
I didn't think that is their goal. I thought their goal was to get Russia to leave their country.
Yea, but troll farms influence US elections, and US elections play a role in the war in Ukraine.
An example of this would be Trump deciding to buy diesel from Russia, which helps Russia fund their war against Ukraine.
So stopping troll farms can help work towards the goal of getting Russia to leave their country.
They influence not only elections but the general opinion about a lot of things.
I have several people close to me who has been sceptical about the reach of Russian disinformation in the years leading up to us joining NATO, and this is just the latest in many events that has proven very useful for showcasing just how integrated that disinformation is in our daily life. This while we are better at countering them than most, supposedly. Just talking about them in school is not enough anymore. They're fucking cockroaches and more of this is needed. Preferably on a daily basis.
Well... it's to debilitate the Russian economy until Russians can no longer force-project across the border.
But anyone who believes Yandex was the soft underbelly of Moscow is going to be disappointed. Russian troops aren't going to leave because a data center got lit up. On the contrary, this becomes further agitation within Russia to spend an increasing amount of domestic wealth and civilian lives flinging firebombs at Ukrainian infrastructure. With the intended goal of debilitating the Ukrainian economy until Ukrainians can no longer force-project over the border.
This is purely a war of attrition. There's no target either side could hit that would end it, prior to a national political realignment or a wholesale economic collapse. Even if one side managed to dome off Putin or Zelensky, the war would drag on under their immediate successors.
And yet /r/conservative went silent. Just like the last time Russian bot farms were targeted.
The sub has purged itself so many times, I don't even know who still has the rights to post there.
Nevertheless, I'm seeing new content as recent as 47 minutes ago. Plenty of posts in the last two hours. The same meager activity from a community that has kicked itself in the dick so many times that it no longer has a user base to speak of.
I'm not opposed to blowing up data centers in general, just saying...
I assume that includes the ones in which Piefed, Lemmy.world and Gizmodo are hosted?
Nah you still need datacenter compute for orchestration
Silence the back end and front end goes quiet. Also if they run their back end on servers in another country then it leaves them open to counter espionage.
I respectfully disagree, more data centers should be destroyed, the Russian one currently should take priority