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Cake day: September 25th, 2026
  • dfyx@piefed.socialtoTechnology@lemmy.world•Russian Bot Activity Collapses by 84% After Strikes on Yandex Data CentersEnglish
    14·
    8 days ago
    1. Because people still misread a single CloudFlare graph that shows a huge drop in bot traffic. The thing is, that graph only shows traffic between one specific subnet and CloudFlare. If you bomb a data center, of course that data center’s traffic drops. But for the internet overall, that’s less than 0.1% of the total bot traffic and social media bots don’t target CloudFlare. They target Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. There is no reason they would ever even show up in CloudFlare’s statistics.
    2. Barely anyone seems to actually measure the amount of bot activity on social networks. They see less traffic so that must mean fewer bot-written posts.
    3. Even the one linked here is misleading. Seems like they did analyze message contents but a very small amount (less than 5000 per day) and their “84% drop” happened for 1.5 days then immediately recovered.
    4. For those who profit from the bots, it’s a great narrative. Now they can claim that everything positive about them that you see on social media must be true because after all, the evil bots are dead and only true Americans write stuff about Trump, a couple of weeks before the midterms. Or about the German AfD fighting against being banned.
    5. Cognitive biases. Many of us (including me) desperately want this to be true so we are less likely to critically examine the details. I don’t think Jowi Morales who wrote the Tom’s Hardware article that many other articles quote wanted to mislead anyone. He saw something that fit his worldview and went with it. It’s the same reason why we’ve seen “the AI bubble is about to collapse any minute now” articles basically every week for over a year and yet it’s still going.