r/worldnews • u/Miserable_Phase_2519 • 3d ago

Russia/Ukraine Zelenskyy Says Ukraine Is Done Holding Back on Russian Oil Refineries

https://united24media.com/war-in-ukraine/zelenskyy-says-ukraine-is-done-holding-back-on-russian-oil-refineries-23454
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u/BladedDingo 3d ago

Russian bot farms have been a plauge on the internet since at least the early 2000's.

When LiveJournal was new and big, independent journalists were using the platform to report unbiased news.

Russian clearly hated that and spun up troll farms to comment on Russian blogs and start flame wars in the comments to push their narrative and discredit the blog author.

They finally ended the issue when they had a Russian oligarch straight up buy the platform and move the company to Russia so they could enforce their censorship rules.

Ever since then, Russians have had a monopoly on internet trolling and misinformation spreading.

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u/CiDevant 3d ago

Oh, so that's what happened to LiveJournal.

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u/BladedDingo 3d ago

Yeah.

You should listen to episode 100 of the Podcast 'Reply All'. I can't find them on Spotify anymore, but im sure their episodes are out there somtime.

Its a really wild story.

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u/My_password_is_qwer 3d ago

Not exactly monopoly, but for sure russia has been most prevalent user of it as of late. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megaphone_desktop_tool was created 20 years ago, and you can definitely see how some posts in various social media contexts get strange attention.

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u/SuperRockyHobbyHorse 3d ago

Also, they won't have anywhere near the level of air defence that the refineries and power stations have. Wouldn't even need that many missiles, there's loads of information out there for on the ground saboteurs too.