I’ve seen a number of news articles disproving this recent viral claim - saying the “bots” traffic lost was just the equivalent of Russia’s Google’s crawlers. Honestly though, beyond occasional use of Lemmy, I don’t use any social media so I have no experience as to things feeling different.
Is it actually quieter out there or is it just wishful thinking?
Those articles don’t debunk shit, they just explain that the data on the charts is web crawlers. Nobody but platform owners can effectively estimate the amount of bot traffic they have - and even if they can distinguish today, cause with AIs it’s really complicated.
So we just don’t have the stats, but it doesn’t mean people can’t use personal perception. And yes, xitter is a lot cleaner now.
What the article really does is challenge the notion that bot behavior on social media is down as there is a significant lack of evidence. The burden of proof lies with the one who makes the claim, in this case, a European Parliament MP and the Ukrainian government (namely: Zelensky who repeated the claim).
As there is no evidence yet, and the only ‘evidence’ being touted so far does not in fact show what they say it does, the notion is falsified until further evidence is provided.
I’m sure people are happy to think social media has been ‘cleaned up’ a lot more, but I have yet to see any verified and reliable evidence that isn’t just ‘well I feel like’.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there was an initial down spike but realistically they’d just spin up the bots somewhere else basically immediately.
Like a lot of what a data center does is act as a glorified router. You’d need to take out a server that just so happened to host some bot code that somehow isn’t stored anywhere else for the effects to be permanent…
Or other countries actually stop taking Russian money. One of the two.
My understanding is in those cases the troll farms are routing traffic through the devices, not running bots on the device itself, but I guess I wouldn’t be particularly surprised if that could work too.
I’ve seen a number of news articles disproving this recent viral claim - saying the “bots” traffic lost was just the equivalent of Russia’s Google’s crawlers. Honestly though, beyond occasional use of Lemmy, I don’t use any social media so I have no experience as to things feeling different.
Is it actually quieter out there or is it just wishful thinking?
Those articles don’t debunk shit, they just explain that the data on the charts is web crawlers. Nobody but platform owners can effectively estimate the amount of bot traffic they have - and even if they can distinguish today, cause with AIs it’s really complicated.
So we just don’t have the stats, but it doesn’t mean people can’t use personal perception. And yes, xitter is a lot cleaner now.
What the article really does is challenge the notion that bot behavior on social media is down as there is a significant lack of evidence. The burden of proof lies with the one who makes the claim, in this case, a European Parliament MP and the Ukrainian government (namely: Zelensky who repeated the claim).
As there is no evidence yet, and the only ‘evidence’ being touted so far does not in fact show what they say it does, the notion is falsified until further evidence is provided.
I’m sure people are happy to think social media has been ‘cleaned up’ a lot more, but I have yet to see any verified and reliable evidence that isn’t just ‘well I feel like’.
All I know is on Insta I’m seeing far less transphobic comments and one nation supporting bots
I think the internet traffic itself spells it out. There’s a noticeable difference
There is a real tangible drop. But it’s also limited in scope.
So where the bots focused yeah it was night and day different. But over all? Really kind of a drop in the bucket.
So personal experience just varies wildly based on where online you hang out.
I’ve seen several comment sections on like AP articles critical of the Trump administration that had like zero pushback in the comments
I wouldn’t be surprised if there was an initial down spike but realistically they’d just spin up the bots somewhere else basically immediately.
Like a lot of what a data center does is act as a glorified router. You’d need to take out a server that just so happened to host some bot code that somehow isn’t stored anywhere else for the effects to be permanent…
Or other countries actually stop taking Russian money. One of the two.
I’d imagine most bots originate from compromised Pcs and other IoT devices and the servers are just coordinators.
My understanding is in those cases the troll farms are routing traffic through the devices, not running bots on the device itself, but I guess I wouldn’t be particularly surprised if that could work too.
So, the data center attacks could slow or stop the flow of traffic, regardless of how many devices are compromised?
Regardless, Russian data centers are viable targets for Ukraine. Behind military and oil infrastructure, of course, but still viable targets.
Right, if nothing else they lost native capability, which is an important thing to have.
It’s just not a permanent fix when they can just buy server time from China or whoever.
It’s just a vibes thing that relies on the ignorance of the audience.
Most normies have no concept of what a crawler is, let alone a bot of any kind.