A lot of people I know shared posts about the Yandex datacenter bombing resulting in a decrease in Russian misinformation/disinformation bot activity, sometimes with charts. Let this be a reminder every one of us could be fooled by a story that we really want to be true.
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I saw the same with the UK PM's claim that Russia influenced Brexit.
Both of these were disinformation.
They played on the bigotry of a lot of people on mastodon which you identified as something 'we really want to be true.' I would call it Russo-phobia, and some of us are definitely not in the we here.
I expected better of people here, and can only hope there is a bit of personal reflection from the people who posted and boosted these stories.
Yup i did too. Zelenskyy sourced it.
Its so easy to sling words the inherent value has plummeted. And so it goes.
@evacide Damn. A shame that the desperation for any kind of good news can make a mark out of any of us.
@evacide to me it’s a sign we need to run more tests.
@evacide It fooled me indeed.
Thinking about it: there are a million reasons not to use GAFAM datacenters, being a Russian troll farm is not one of them.
@evacide your case in point:
"Is Zelensky right to say data centre strikes have taken down Russian bots?"
basically: no
If it reminds us and provides more attention to the disinformation and even sponsoring Russia is spreading in the West since 1999 I would not mind at all. The only thing is it should activate us to do more much against it.
@evacide It really just dropped down scrapper activity, which wasn't nothing. But Yandex is just a shitty Russian search engine, not the endless source of right wing propaganda.
That being said, I saw zero change in the efficacy of my Kagi searches. I wish they'd stop paying them.
@nuintari @evacide
It's much more than a shitty search engine. They are essentially a digital extension of our government, one of the two. A huge part of our websites went down due to being hosted and/or operated on yandex infra. They monopolized taxi and food delivery in many cities, are one of the two major digital map providers, are building another worthless messaging app, host the only useful cloud storage in russia, operate a sovereign youtube surrogate (yt is banned here), and a crappy clone of every other google cloud suite product.
Their services are used by basically every organization (since most of western alternatives are banned or illegal).
People like me, that are not reliant on their services, lost nothing. In fact, this will make more people aware that their shit is NOT safe when it's all managed by a single tech corp.
It's much more than a shitty search engine. They are essentially a digital extension of our government, one of the two. A huge part of our websites went down due to being hosted and/or operated on yandex infra. They monopolized taxi and food delivery in many cities, are one of the two major digital map providers, are building another worthless messaging app, host the only useful cloud storage in russia, operate a sovereign youtube surrogate (yt is banned here), and a crappy clone of every other google cloud suite product.
Their services are used by basically every organization (since most of western alternatives are banned or illegal).
People like me, that are not reliant on their services, lost nothing. In fact, this will make more people aware that their shit is NOT safe when it's all managed by a single tech corp.
@evacide Yep, I've seen that (eg see below) and others saying it's not true.
I'm tending not to believe this is real and think it's more likely that people are seeing a potential meme and jumping on it.
@evacide Yep, I've seen that (eg see below) and others saying it's not true.
I'm tending not to believe this is real and think it's more likely that people are seeing a potential meme and jumping on it.
@evacide People didn't question (including me) it because the story originated with Zelensky himself.
@evacide Folks have zero evidence for what they claim… 0
@evacide You are wrong. I did the math and literally thousands of trolls harassing young female Finnish politicians on Facebook all disappeared at once, at the same time, coinciding with the Yandex explosion. For most profiles I’ve taken reports of numbers dropping at face value, but because of your post and others miming it, I went and did the math. There’s a more than 90 % drop on hateful reactions and comments on the first three profiles I came across that the algorithm recommended to me. I’ve been following the troll traffic on young female politicians’ FB pages for two years now because I fear fascists are trying to influence the next Finnish parliamentary elections by making young women especially too scared to show up. Stories which gaslight and underplay real experiences on mass harrassment have come out in Finnish as a result of comments such as this so I actually find this comment somewhat harmful and as badly sourced as half on the original story. Thankfully I have eyes and a brain and I can check these stats myself on Facebook, and seems at least one user here agrees with my observations.