Reform figures see social media engagement drop as bot accounts 'fall silent'
www.thelondoneconomic.com
The social media engagement on posts from Reform UK figures appears to have dropped in the wake of Ukrainian strikes on Russian data centres.

cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/11858876

cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/11858823

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Over the weekend, Ukraine carried out a co-ordinated drone strike against several major Russian data centres. This completely decimated Russia’s Yandex, … which controls more than 70% of search traffic in the country, and has reportedly resulted in a dramatic fall in bot traffic from the Yandex network.

As per the bot analysts at Tom’s Hardware, bot traffic from the Yandex network has dropped to just 0.4% of the maximum number of HTTP requests recorded in the past two weeks. That means activity from automated, Russian-hosted accounts has been virtually eliminated on social media.

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As a result, the social media engagement on posts from [far-right] Reform UK figures appears to have dropped in the wake of Ukrainian strikes on Russian data centres.

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There has already been a strong and significant impact on bot traffic in countries such as France and Germany.

David Colon, a French information operations researcher, has noted a huge difference in the performance of narratives generated by the Russia-linked information operations group, Storm-1516.

The silencing of the bots also appears to have caused a dramatic drop in activity around Germany’s far-right AfD…

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Amongst others, the article is citing Britain’s Reform politician Richard Tice. Three posts on X from the Reform deputy leader to his almost 400,000 followers on Monday, 11 October [hadn’t] hit triple figures for reposts or comments, with one not even reaching 10,000 views … Before the Ukrainian strikes on the Russia data centres, Tice’s posts got considerably more engagement, consistently hitting triple figures for comments and reposts, whilst racking up hundreds of thousands of views.

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A similar pattern can be seen when it comes to other far-right figures such as Nigel Farage [the linked article is given evidence about that].

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As Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky himself said after the strikes on Russian data centres, it’s suddenly become a “little easier to breathe” on social media.

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Archived

  • Miller@lemmy.world
    32·
    3 days ago

    The Russians were right, Europe is riddled with Nazi voices, and most of them have Russian accents.

    • tardigrade@scribe.disroot.orgOP
      23·
      3 days ago

      I get your point. But as a European, I can assure you that Europe isn’t riddled with Nazis, the few that are here are just louder. They have, however, indeed Russian accents, and some are fluent in Chinese.

      • Miller@lemmy.world
        6·
        3 days ago

        Riddled just seemed to fit better in the sentence and implied localised decay or rot associated with it, but you can read sprinkled or dotted if you prefer. And they as you agree have foreign accents, or if they don’t their friends do.

  • Hotstillnasty@lemmy.world
    21·
    3 days ago

    So countries around the world are doing something about this obvious social engineering by a foreign country… Waiting any minute for the announcements

  • rbos@lemmy.ca
    10·
    3 days ago

    While the actual bots are being run from a diverse selection of compromised devices or free apps that act as endpoints, i bet some of the C&Cs are run out of Yandex cloud.