This graph shows that Yandex Web crawler farm was hit. The other option, it was shut down to accommodate more critical services that got hit. (I worked for Yandex 20 years ago, one crawler guy was in the same room.) Not sure if troll farms got affected in any way, that is a different business entirely, no overlap.
The interesting aspect is this: Yandex was taken from its owners semi-consensually. Similarly, the original owner of the troll farms was blown up in a business jet. He staged a mutiny cause his dirty bloody business was about to be taken from him non-consensually. Some other large non-consensual takeovers unfold for 5 years, soon 6.
I don't use X myself, but my friends told me there's a noticable reduction in hateful tweets, at least in the Polish sphere. Much less comments blaming Ukrainians for everything wrong with the world.
Either Ukraine was aiming exactly for that or it is just a coincidence and Ukraine is going to exploit it further because reducing Russian bot activity will reduce visibility for parties which are openly hostile to Ukraine (like AfD) which reduces their ability to get into power.
It’s also possible the US and UK gave targeting information or helped Ukraine with site selection. It’s not like we don’t know where this stuff is coming from.
With some analysis, it might be possible to figure out which accounts were Russian trolls by comparing tweet frequency with the timing of these bombings.
There's of course the obvious, low effort trolling, but I'd think there are also more subtle, maybe more intellectually equipped information warfare going on.
I hate Russia with a passion and strongly support Ukraine, but this kind of convenient narrative always makes me suspicious. (I use Twitter daily and haven't necessarily noticed anything.)
Reminds me of when 4channers said 4chan's daily interracial posting went way down on October 7, 2023. (It didn't.)
I could believe this, but not before I see a good empirical analysis. Until then, it just feels like typical folk gossip.
No, I know. That doesn't necessarily mean these Yandex data centers being hit affected that yesterday and today, though. For a variety of different possible reasons.
EDMO published an analysis on the topic[0] of "independent anti-vax influencers" unrelated to Russia, suddenly pushing viewpoints that explicitly benefit Russia in a coordinated manner.
Seconded. The amount of "someone who claims to be on my side has a bad view, must be a bot!" is absurd.
People have been problematic since recorded time, and the whole "well X% of internet traffic is bots!" doesn't mean the % you're interacting with is just that.
99.99% (totally made up for example) of the emails I am probably sent are spam, those are filtered automatically before I even see them by the various email providers, and of the remaining .01% some still slips through.
I feel that there's somewhat of a similar disconnect between "x amount of traffic is bots" and people assuming that means that supposed ally who says horrible things is a bot (...or psyop..or false flag...or etc...)
I always assumed that all of those people were correct, everyone they were arguing with is a bot. What I think they overlooked is that everyone they agreeing with is a bot too.
Is this sarcasm? You don't see a lack of something. That's what it means. To prove a reduction you have to look at aggregate statistics and sentiment analysis.
Since this submission is kind of on the topic of trolling, I miss good old fashioned forum troll comments like this. non political, not immediately obvious, cortisol provoking (7/10)
Previously we can point to data and see things like Scotland Independence accounts all go quite on mass when Iran goes offline, or the OSRS player base go down and the gold price spike when Venezuela has a blackout.
I've seen no analysis connecting Yandex's sabotage to a drop in hate speech on the English speaking internet.
There's a lot of ancedotes "I've seen hatespeech drop" etc. This is measurable and there are people measuring this kind of thing. Let's wait for some real data.
This is a great example of a headline that has two completely different meanings to two different groups.
Many are (incorrectly) interpreting 'bot traffic' to mean something like "fake users on social media that leave comments and 'likes' supporting right-wing posts". (this is something Russian bots were accused of during the 2016 US presidential election)
But Yandex is like Russia's Google. Both Google and Yandex need to scrape the internet in order to index it in their search (no index means the site would not appear in search results).
So Yandex datacenters going down meant so too did their scrapers (i.e. their 'bots' that visit sites to index them). Nothing to do with 'bots' as per the Russia collusion allegations a la the 2016 election.
Those CF country stats are certifiably useless. They only know the last hop. We know that consumer routers and web browser extensions are vulnerable. There are plenty of ways to bounce malicious traffic through assumed-organic hosts. These are almost impossible to track, especially given the prevalence of CGNAT.
No serious person would ever claim that Russian cyber influence operations were sending traffic directly from Russian IP addresses. That's 'Get Smart' levels of absurdity. It's as ridiculous as a Russian spy pretending to be an American while speaking with a thick Russian accent.
Looking at the destruction of Yandex data centers, these days it shows how terrifying drones are as weapons.
I'm curious about how to defend against such drones.
Are kamikaze drones a method of exploding on a target after image learning?
> these days it shows how terrifying drones are as weapons.
They aren't fundamentally different from a hundreds of assholes sitting in an airplane 25,000 feet above you, flying above the ceiling of your flak and air interceptors, dropping a few thousand tons of firebombs on your town.
> I'm curious about how to defend against such drones.
I haven't seen this effect documented but if it isn't being documented it really needs to be. We need to get -very- mad about the soft wars being waged right now and the first step is to understand the extent of what is going on and by who. We all know that bots are driving a massive amount of engagement right now. It is rare though to see such direct causal proof of where it is coming from.
It's hard to document on the major platforms because neither X nor Meta provide easy access to streaming APIs that researchers might use to verify such claims. Last time I looked X was about $60k/year, for example.
Would you mind posting at least one link? If it's actually documented across the internet, this should take you no time. A bunch of anecdotes does not count, though.
Curious where it’s being documented - this is a fascinating study (who knows how long time period to measure its impact will last) - do you have links?
You made an account 4 minutes ago just to post this? Of course, it is obvious what they meant. The AfD voters are real voters, but they can still be driven by hate stirred up by (among other things) Russian bots.
By the way, the 40% was in one particular Bundesland (Saksen-Anhalt). In the polling for the national elections they are around 28%:
This graph shows that Yandex Web crawler farm was hit. The other option, it was shut down to accommodate more critical services that got hit. (I worked for Yandex 20 years ago, one crawler guy was in the same room.) Not sure if troll farms got affected in any way, that is a different business entirely, no overlap.
The interesting aspect is this: Yandex was taken from its owners semi-consensually. Similarly, the original owner of the troll farms was blown up in a business jet. He staged a mutiny cause his dirty bloody business was about to be taken from him non-consensually. Some other large non-consensual takeovers unfold for 5 years, soon 6.
What an appetite!
You really should mention chef-cum-media-mogul-cum-PMC-commander Prigozhin by name.
Yevheniy Prigozhin, of Wagner PMC fame lately (and ultimately):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yevgeny_Prigozhin
> Not sure if troll farms got affected in any way, that is a different business entirely, no overlap.
Was a different business. Before the "consensual" takeover.
After the takeover, there's only one business that matters.
I don't use X myself, but my friends told me there's a noticable reduction in hateful tweets, at least in the Polish sphere. Much less comments blaming Ukrainians for everything wrong with the world.
Either Ukraine was aiming exactly for that or it is just a coincidence and Ukraine is going to exploit it further because reducing Russian bot activity will reduce visibility for parties which are openly hostile to Ukraine (like AfD) which reduces their ability to get into power.
It’s also possible the US and UK gave targeting information or helped Ukraine with site selection. It’s not like we don’t know where this stuff is coming from.
US? Absolutely not
UK? Quite possibly. Given their recent admission (finally) around the Russian propaganda for Brexit
Thanks for the pointer to that Brexit story. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c6jdm3zggl0ko for anyone else who's not seen it.
US is helping with targeting and a lot of things.
Most of those drones have starlink recivers.
UK has no infra to target even their own missiles. They always had to use US!
With some analysis, it might be possible to figure out which accounts were Russian trolls by comparing tweet frequency with the timing of these bombings.
There's of course the obvious, low effort trolling, but I'd think there are also more subtle, maybe more intellectually equipped information warfare going on.
Same in Germany : AFD's activity went abruptly down apparently.
Can you link a reliable source for this? The only thing I could find online was someone claiming this with a chart that does not refer to Afd at all.
As far as I can tell there is no reliable data that would indicate any of that.
I hate Russia with a passion and strongly support Ukraine, but this kind of convenient narrative always makes me suspicious. (I use Twitter daily and haven't necessarily noticed anything.)
Reminds me of when 4channers said 4chan's daily interracial posting went way down on October 7, 2023. (It didn't.)
I could believe this, but not before I see a good empirical analysis. Until then, it just feels like typical folk gossip.
Russia’s use of social media to influence western thought and sow discord is pretty well documented (even in their geopolitical texts).
Eg https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328006677_Weaponizi...
This is an easy topic to find empirical analysis.
No, I know. That doesn't necessarily mean these Yandex data centers being hit affected that yesterday and today, though. For a variety of different possible reasons.
right, so far we have yandex search crawler went offline
yet to see any evidence of anything else going down
EDMO published an analysis on the topic[0] of "independent anti-vax influencers" unrelated to Russia, suddenly pushing viewpoints that explicitly benefit Russia in a coordinated manner.
[0] https://edmo.eu/publications/how-covid-19-conspiracy-theoris...
Seconded. The amount of "someone who claims to be on my side has a bad view, must be a bot!" is absurd.
People have been problematic since recorded time, and the whole "well X% of internet traffic is bots!" doesn't mean the % you're interacting with is just that.
99.99% (totally made up for example) of the emails I am probably sent are spam, those are filtered automatically before I even see them by the various email providers, and of the remaining .01% some still slips through.
I feel that there's somewhat of a similar disconnect between "x amount of traffic is bots" and people assuming that means that supposed ally who says horrible things is a bot (...or psyop..or false flag...or etc...)
I always assumed that all of those people were correct, everyone they were arguing with is a bot. What I think they overlooked is that everyone they agreeing with is a bot too.
I've actually seen less controversial comments here on HN as well.
That’s on me. I’ve been commenting less.
[dead]
What about true social?
For those claiming a drop in hate speech on social media, I’ve yet to see examples of this. Plenty of claims, no examples.
Is this sarcasm? You don't see a lack of something. That's what it means. To prove a reduction you have to look at aggregate statistics and sentiment analysis.
Since this submission is kind of on the topic of trolling, I miss good old fashioned forum troll comments like this. non political, not immediately obvious, cortisol provoking (7/10)
I would like to see some evidence.
Previously we can point to data and see things like Scotland Independence accounts all go quite on mass when Iran goes offline, or the OSRS player base go down and the gold price spike when Venezuela has a blackout.
I've seen no analysis connecting Yandex's sabotage to a drop in hate speech on the English speaking internet.
That's what he's asking for, but it seems Xitter becoming a walled garden has killed those old "trend" charting sites that used to exist around it.
What? At night I definitely see a lack of sun. He's exactly asking for statistics.
There's a lot of ancedotes "I've seen hatespeech drop" etc. This is measurable and there are people measuring this kind of thing. Let's wait for some real data.
I'd like to see this data too. What report would you recommend?
An important detail for those, like me, who have't kept up with the news: this was drone strike against a yandex data center, not cyber attack.
Multiple drone strikes, against three different data centers.
Previously discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50041619
This is a great example of a headline that has two completely different meanings to two different groups.
Many are (incorrectly) interpreting 'bot traffic' to mean something like "fake users on social media that leave comments and 'likes' supporting right-wing posts". (this is something Russian bots were accused of during the 2016 US presidential election)
But Yandex is like Russia's Google. Both Google and Yandex need to scrape the internet in order to index it in their search (no index means the site would not appear in search results).
So Yandex datacenters going down meant so too did their scrapers (i.e. their 'bots' that visit sites to index them). Nothing to do with 'bots' as per the Russia collusion allegations a la the 2016 election.
How do you know that?
Here is their definition of "bot": https://developers.cloudflare.com/radar/glossary/#verified-b...
He can read and think.
How do you think Cloudflare gets this bot traffic metric?
By counting requests against their CDN
Thanks Ukraine
According to Cloudflare, US still accounts for majority of the bot traffic though. https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots?dateRange=12w#bot-traffic-...
Yandex is just a drop in the ocean bud.
Those CF country stats are certifiably useless. They only know the last hop. We know that consumer routers and web browser extensions are vulnerable. There are plenty of ways to bounce malicious traffic through assumed-organic hosts. These are almost impossible to track, especially given the prevalence of CGNAT.
No serious person would ever claim that Russian cyber influence operations were sending traffic directly from Russian IP addresses. That's 'Get Smart' levels of absurdity. It's as ridiculous as a Russian spy pretending to be an American while speaking with a thick Russian accent.
I wonder if their SREs have a 'Drone strike' playbook.
Looking at the destruction of Yandex data centers, these days it shows how terrifying drones are as weapons. I'm curious about how to defend against such drones. Are kamikaze drones a method of exploding on a target after image learning?
I’m sure I’m wrong, but I remember reading about lasers being used as a cost effective defense mechanism
Something like https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-military-laser-shoots-down-c...
very thanks!
> these days it shows how terrifying drones are as weapons.
They aren't fundamentally different from a hundreds of assholes sitting in an airplane 25,000 feet above you, flying above the ceiling of your flak and air interceptors, dropping a few thousand tons of firebombs on your town.
> I'm curious about how to defend against such drones.
That one's pretty easy, don't start wars.
This is sad to see considering Yandex seems to be the only company with a proper image search right now.
It's actually incredible how terrible google images seems in comparison. Yandex is just so, so good for reverse image search
This is being documented across the internet. Pro AfD posting plummeted and pro Trump posting plummeted.
It makes me wonder whether activists should have been targeting these operations sooner. I had no idea they were so centralized.
I haven't seen this effect documented but if it isn't being documented it really needs to be. We need to get -very- mad about the soft wars being waged right now and the first step is to understand the extent of what is going on and by who. We all know that bots are driving a massive amount of engagement right now. It is rare though to see such direct causal proof of where it is coming from.
It's hard to document on the major platforms because neither X nor Meta provide easy access to streaming APIs that researchers might use to verify such claims. Last time I looked X was about $60k/year, for example.
[dead]
Would you mind posting at least one link? If it's actually documented across the internet, this should take you no time. A bunch of anecdotes does not count, though.
Curious where it’s being documented - this is a fascinating study (who knows how long time period to measure its impact will last) - do you have links?
Can someone post the actual data sources for this ? I keep seeing people claim this and even post graphs, but 0 sources.
Source: trust me bro
Activists? You think the Russian propaganda machine can be defeated by activists?
Sure, if enough activists are involved, with sufficient skill and compute.
What's a government if not a bunch of organized activists?
AdD has like 40% of votes in germany. They must be all russian trolls.
You made an account 4 minutes ago just to post this? Of course, it is obvious what they meant. The AfD voters are real voters, but they can still be driven by hate stirred up by (among other things) Russian bots.
By the way, the 40% was in one particular Bundesland (Saksen-Anhalt). In the polling for the national elections they are around 28%:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_G...
40% in Sachsen-Anhalt. Not 40% in Germany total.
Aaand the bot drivers are now back online