Technology

Zuck brags that 80% of your friend list will be AI and you think Meta is trying to keep out the bots?

Why would Meta or Twitter block them?

It doesn't actually make sense for Russia to be running their Digital Propaganda agents from Russian IP addresses

I would expect they are passing that traffic through a shitton of pwned computers around the world.

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.

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.

Tomshardware doesn't show twitter account changes it talks about cloudflare traffic and expert opinions but thelondoneconimoc has a better article on the effects on e.g. Reform’s twitter.

Edit:

Here’s a quote from my above source

Take Richard Tice for example. Below are three posts on X from the Reform deputy leader to his almost 400,000 followers on Monday, 11 October. At the time of writing, none of the posts had hit triple figures for reposts or comments, with one not even reaching 10,000 views.

{...}

Before the Ukrainian strikes on the Russia data centres, Tice’s posts got considerably more engagement, consistently hitting triple figures for comments and reposts, whilst racking up hundreds of thousands of views.

Which gives exactly no evidence of a decline in social media bots.

If you actually click the source link in the article, you see that the graph shows the bot traffic from "AS13238 YANDEX — Yandex LLC", not the internet overall. That caption was conveniently cropped. Also, those bots are very likely not the kind that post on twitter but web crawlers. Yandex is a search engine. Of course destroying its data centers stops the web crawlers running in those data centers from indexing sites.

I have yet to see an actual statistic of the amount political social media posts or active users on social media sites changing in any way.

Edit: claiming that this attack has destroyed the bot farms and giving mislabeled graphs as sources is actively harmful because it leads people to believe that everything that is left must be "real people" when it's very likely that pretty much all of the bots are still active.