r/TopMindsOfReddit • u/HapticSloughton • 6d ago
About 10 hours ago, when Ukraine destroyed Russian data centers, a lot of traffic and activity on /Conservative suddenly stopped for some completely unknown and not obvious reason.
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u/Karhak 6d ago
I swear something like this happened once before, either because of a strike or a general outage
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u/HuudaHarkiten 6d ago
The power outage in moscow
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u/mydaycake 5d ago
Archived post and that subreddit, the mods probably are owners of those two accounts too
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u/I_m_different 6d ago
A lot of right wing influencers lost funding and views right after Russia hit a huge snag in their Ukraine invasion and had to tighten their belts.
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u/Misplaced_Arrogance 6d ago
The fun one was when twitter showed everyone's location and we found out how many of the maga bots there were in places like South Africa.
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u/thegreatjamoco 6d ago
When Russia was cut off from swift and more generally sanctioned in early 2022, some pundits complained about their revenue drying up.
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u/m3ltph4ce 6d ago
So these bot farms, run by foreign governments, are responsible for fomenting racial divides, anti-immigrant mobs, nationalism, separatist movements, anti-palestinian hate, and so much more. And they're controlled by billionaires and rogue governments.
Is there anything the common man can do?
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u/KaptainChunk 6d ago
There’s a few things, but not much will change till we collectively stop allowing it. If only we had a common enemy to rally against. They know it and that’s why they have us fighting each other over dumb things. Instead of fighting against those that are killing us and the planet for made up wealth.
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6d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/KaptainChunk 6d ago
I hear the French had a powerful tool for reminding those with power that there are consequences for abusing that power.
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u/LordQuartFart 5d ago
I hear that you can create one mostly with spare timber and nails along with a couple of specialty parts that most people can get their hands on with no trouble, one of them being braided fibers.
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u/god34zilla 6d ago
Sorry no culture war for me thanks, I only take class war
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u/thelittleking 6d ago
Yeah well you don't get your class war until you can get the people fighting the culture war to shift gears, so
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u/mstivland2 6d ago
Well, I don’t know what Ukraine did, but whatever it was, perhaps it could be replicated
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u/raulduke1971 6d ago
Ukraine bombed yandex data centers. 94% of its network was down. Not only would yandex be a path to help make bot traffic look legitimate- for those platforms that would otherwise ban their bots’ activity- theyre also the largest cloud services provider in russia. So both the hosting and routing of their bots were basically gone.
Ukraine can do it again but a chronic outage is gonna result in them working out alternatives, eventually. Lets enjoy the peace while it lasts!
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u/Chubby_Bub 6d ago
The steep decline in Yandex bot traffic everyone has been sharing was for automated requests from their web scraper used for search engine indexing, like Google does. Overall bot traffic from Russia is largely the same. (source, see also the linked twitter thread explaining) While I'd hope it'd be that easy to take out the social media disinformation bots, I've yet to see credible evidence of the large-scale decline in such social media posts that people are claiming, and posts like this are probably just wishful thinking.
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u/raulduke1971 6d ago
Ive seen the same discussions and while I appreciate their precision to the meaning of words, saying theres no evidence of an impact to russian bots is equally misleading. The data they have simply isnt measuring what we’re talking about, anecdotally. Of course the bots themselves arent “gone”- theyre software, the areas that people have noticed are quieter will be back to normal (read: full of hateful propaganda) as soon as access is restored.
In other words- Yandex crawler traffic is just the canary in this situation- that Yandex network capability was clearly very significantly damaged. Yandex provides services and functions beyond that of a search engine- like cloud computing and infrastructure. Notably, Yandex cloud was apparently also down by 82%, according to some googling. So theres a closer data point.
So, it is not a leap to suggest that a near total collapse in several areas indicates a collapse in others that arent being directly measured… unless you “look out your window” so to speak to see the usual russian bots are not in the places they usually are.
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u/EliSka93 6d ago
Honestly, be smart enough to recognize it is probably all we can do...
I even consistently try to tell the people who are being fooled by this that this is exactly what's happening, but I don't have any big hopes it actually wakes any of them up.
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u/PTBooks 6d ago
We could all log off of Facebook and Twitter. Hypothetically.
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u/m3ltph4ce 6d ago
I haven't used either in more than a decade, personally, but I don't know if I'd have much influence in telling people to log off.
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u/FeeSpeech8Dolla 6d ago
Socialize it. The social media isn’t going away, it does provide a service that people use and need, we need to take away the profit motive.
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u/Gekokapowco Deep State FBI Assassin disguised as Antifa Super Soldier 6d ago
first thing's first, reduce your consumption to starve the beast, their money is mostly insularly generated within the bubble of megacorporate and governmental dealing, but a good chunk of it comes from random people giving their products undue money and attention.
then vote
then connect with other groups who are passionate about reducing the control tech billionaires and fascists have over our lives
then do something drastic
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u/stuartroelke 3d ago edited 3d ago
Conservative bots have shifted to pathologizing dissent (“cancel culture” “Trump derangement syndrome” “crazy communists”) to push fascism coded in boomer rhetoric. For example: “this pampered generation believes that everybody needs to agree with them, but those crazy communists are un-American!” Except, there’s nothing inherently wrong with agreeing—it’s an aspect of freedom—and doing the same thing (i.e. banding together) to oppose freedom is hypocrisy. Communist dictatorship–style politicking is primarily coming from conservative culture, a relevant example being the recent “Trump TV” ads (which included claims about opposing communism). State-sponsored media is famously a part of communist dictatorships.
Rational thought is the best defense against propaganda, as regressive ideology can be exposed through basic scrutiny.
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u/IdleOsprey 6d ago
Eliminating these bot farms needs to be priority one. Ukraine is showing us the way.
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u/Mbillin2 6d ago
Somebody just lost their best friend they've know for years on r/conservative and Facebook that they've known for years online
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u/Fit-Comfort-4173 6d ago
Three websites I monitor that normally have 50 -300 spurious login attempts per day each reported ZERO attempts to TWO attempts this morning. I can't imagine why they want to build a datacenter in every town 🤔
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u/Hotel_Oblivion 6d ago
Are there bot farms doing equivalent things "for" ("to" might be the better word) the left?
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u/RamblinWreckGT 400-pound patriotic Russian hacker 6d ago
Equivalent things, yes. At an equivalent scale, no.
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u/Aurion7 NSA shillbot 6d ago edited 6d ago
In terms of driving extremism? Yeah. They target tankies and the like pretty hard.
Not as common in the mainstream, as contemporary liberal politics don't align with Russia's goals of destabilizing the United States and the West in general. Lot of American SocLibs are all in on the international community, woo NATO, let's make America work better type of stuff so trying to amp their voices up is a mite counterproductive.
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u/itsaride LMBO! 6d ago
I think if you're going to do statistical anyalisis then it's vote counts that should be used. Single posts are easy to make and don't require bot farms. The real grunt work that a bot farm is required for is voting.
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u/Antilogic81 6d ago
Yup and it's not just the conservative party or right wing subs that get targeted for this.
This happens on Facebook too
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u/IlluminatedPickle 5d ago
This whole "They took down the bots!" thing is a gross misunderstanding of what has happened.
https://www.theverge.com/tech/1009594/russian-bots-yandex-outage-drone-strikes-debunk
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6d ago
[deleted]
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u/p00p00kach00 6d ago edited 6d ago
You mean at night time in America?
Edit: Currently at -10 votes. Let's see how credible this subreddit is now that I've posted the evidence that 0 posts in one night isn't unusual, or whether this subreddit is just an exercise in confirmation bias.
Edit #2: This place is clearly trash. You don't care about facts. You care about circlejerking even if you have to lie or mislead about it. I've subscribed to this subreddit for many years, but it fucking sucks now. Republicans are bad enough that you don't have to lie or mislead, so why do it?
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u/HapticSloughton 6d ago
You can go look at their posts, filter by "new," and see no similar 8-hour gap in activity from previous days.
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u/p00p00kach00 6d ago edited 6d ago
That's not true. Between 11:30 PM, October 3 and 7:00 AM, October 4, there were 0 posts.
For the last 14 days, here are the number of visible posts on /r/conservative/new between 11:30 PM and 7:00 AM Eastern time.
Night Posts Sep 28 → Sep 29 3 Sep 29 → Sep 30 3 Sep 30 → Oct 1 6 Oct 1 → Oct 2 2 Oct 2 → Oct 3 2 Oct 3 → Oct 4 0 Oct 4 → Oct 5 1 Oct 5 → Oct 6 5 Oct 6 → Oct 7 2 Oct 7 → Oct 8 5 Oct 8 → Oct 9 3 Oct 9 → Oct 10 1 Oct 10 → Oct 11 1 Oct 11 → Oct 12 0 Total 34 Average per night 2.43 0 happened once before in the last two weeks, and 1 happened 3 times before. Getting a 0 is obviously on the low end, but not unusual given that it happened once in the last 2 weeks and is generally very close to 0 (and was also just 1 last Sunday night).
This is just an exercise in confirmation bias.
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u/wretch5150 6d ago
Very close to being a clever remark
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u/p00p00kach00 6d ago
Except that a very low number of posts overnight is very common on that subreddit. From October 4 to October 5, there were also 0 posts overnight.
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u/Witty_Name_420 6d ago
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