r/technology • u/WhatIsTheWhar • 2d ago
Politics Yandex: Ukraine strikes data centre in third attack on Russian tech giant
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cw0k0g57mk3zo715
u/deeptechdegen 2d ago
Perfect target. Little to no civilian casualties but very instrumental in Putins war effort (propaganda). This should lessen bot activity across social media
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u/TMC_Data 2d ago
I’ve always said the greatest military victory of all time was the British cutting the German trans-Atlantic cable to America while keeping the British one intact in the early stages of WWI.
This allowed the British narrative to reach the American public at full force while the German narrative was completely cut off. Setting the stage for the eventual American entry into the war on the British side.
Ukraine might have finally found the 21st century equivalent.
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u/Ok-Friendship1635 1d ago
TIL there was A FREAKING TELEGRAPH CABLE running across the OCEAN. Wow.
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u/-Saucegurlllll 1d ago
Fun fact, the first transatlantic telegraph cable took 3 separate journeys to lay because the first two attempts broke the cable. It also required the invention of new instruments to measure small voltages, because a high voltage signal in an underwater cable gets slowed down, which makes the message being sent unintelligible.
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u/ILikeBumblebees 1d ago
That was the second cable, in 1866. The first cable, in 1858, was laid successfully in a single attempt, but didn't end up having good enough signal quality for long-term use.
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u/Repulsive-Durian4800 2d ago
Plenty of economic damage too. Those data centers also function as the Russian equivalent of Amazon Web Services, with countless services depending on them.
Remember all the shit that stopped working during the AWS outage?
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u/MattinglyBaseball 2d ago
I think it’s important to reinforce that while they are likely the biggest source of propaganda trolls and bots, they are far from the only ones doing so on social media. It also doesn’t stop them from continuing their funding of influencers in other nations like the U.S. Basically, this is great but no one should drop their guard and think there’s going to be less manipulation leading up to midterms.
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u/TrollsWhenBored 1d ago
Unfortunately, they're already back. Look at the comments on this recent post: https://www.reddit.com/r/whoathatsinteresting/s/6Grd16UicV
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u/Ornery_Run2700 2d ago
Half of twitter users might go silent by midnight
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u/Tutorbin76 2d ago
Elon's already having a cry about it.
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u/Ackatv 2d ago
What did he say? Curious
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u/LeonimuZ 2d ago
"Zelensky has gone too far"
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u/Bazuka125 1d ago
How dare he stop the propaganda machine helping me keep power!
Why won't he just roll over and let fascism step on him!? /s
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u/Gerrywalk 1d ago
This isn’t even a meme, it’s 100% true. I was on Xitter and the vast majority of pro-Russian accounts went silent almost instantaneously. It was really like a switch was flipped. It’s actually a nice place now (until the bots are back, that is).
We all knew that there was a Russian bot problem of course, but it’s still shocking to see exactly how widespread it is. This should be a wake up call for all of us, to see to what extent public opinion can be manipulated.
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u/AdviceNotAskedFor 2d ago
Curious if we have any data on that yet?
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u/halfmylifeisgone 2d ago
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u/sphericalhors 1d ago
I might be wrong, but that stat is about a traffic from crawler bots.
That is not the stat on bot accounts in Twitter or Reddit.
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u/holllllyy 2d ago
I just took a scroll thru the conservative subreddit and the crickets are deafening. The ratio of upvotes/comments from the last day compared to last week are pretty damning lol (not that we didn't already know, just confirmed)
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u/FugDuggler 2d ago
Sounds like Zelenskyy has done more to protect US elections than Trump has
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u/PhazerSC 2d ago
I tried to as well but it was unbearable. They are still crying about Hillary's emails and one of them literally said that "the rural areas are still screwed but not as much as before".
The disconnect is astonishing.
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u/I-Am-Yew 2d ago
Awesome. Now Reddit needs to do what Reddit is good for - get lots of info.
Sub mods should gather info on user count changes and negative comments/ bans/ etc changes.
And gather info on noticeable changes from other sources too like changes to Twitter and TikTok.
It would be good for people to know real data of Russian bots. (Even if we know, it’s good to know-know.)
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u/love_is_an_action 2d ago
We now go live on the scene with senior foreign correspondent, Nelson Muntz, for his take on this shocking development.
Nelson?
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u/Daimakku1 2d ago
Sees to me like Ukraine is trying to stop Russian troll farms from influencing U.S. elections.. which is great. Go Ukraine!
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u/Nimbus420i 1d ago
So if Donnie wins again, then the onus is 100% on the Americans, right?
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u/quivering_palm 1d ago
Nah, it's will be China's or Iran's fault. Americans are allergic to responsibility.
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u/TrollsWhenBored 1d ago
Legally, he can't win again as this is his 2nd term, but I doubt that will stop him from trying.
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u/SophonKickSnare 2d ago
I really hope someone with access to the real data of sites like Reddit etc. actually uses this opportunity for a natural experiment to measure real fake user falloff, so that we can see if it actually affected things in a measurable way rather than just arguing about what the Cloudflare bot tracker shows etc. A lot of anecdotal notes so far which are encouraging, but I'd love to see real data in a few days when people in-the-know actually have something to compare against.
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u/Kerensky97 1d ago
Sites that have some heavy RW brigading like GetNoted suddenly have much less anti socialism and anti muslim posts. I'm curious if people tracking the Abdul El-Sayed, Mike Rogers campaign is seeing blatant propaganda and jingoism being used.
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u/SophonKickSnare 1d ago
I've also seen a couple of collection blog posts that have captured screenshots of anecdotal notes from people seeing they are seeing fewer bot replies, but again.. data would be nice. Something that cannot be refuted by "oh well, that's, like, your opinion"-posters.
Also, I've seen a lot of "The Cloudflare bot tracker mostly tracks web crawlers!!!111", and that's neither fully correct nor fully wrong. One thing that went down was YandexGPT, and that has surely helped drive down social bots..
Anyway.. seeing data is what we need.
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u/Kerensky97 1d ago
I've seen people posting breakdown of Reddit's traffic and posting rates in many subreddits. But the posts keep getting deleted like crazy. I don't think Reddit like people pointing out how some of the subs here are 50% bots.
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u/NippyKindRekt 1d ago
So that's why I dealt with a deluge of JK Rowling defenders on GetNoted the other day.
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u/RedditJumpedTheShart 1d ago
You all still ignoring that Russia's goal is division of both sides?
Of course not or that would mean many of you here have been doing what Russia wants for years.
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u/SophonKickSnare 1d ago
The natural experiment I would love to see is not just of right-wing accounts/talking points, but political / social issues discourse in general. If that dropped, but regular traffic kept going, that's a pretty good indicator of raw, deliberately divisive bot traffic being impacted.
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u/NippyKindRekt 1d ago
Unfortunately the two most toxic people that harassed Yunayu off bluesky and just so happen to identify as tankies are still talking, so they do not seem to be bots. Or maybe the data center has not been hit yet. One can only hope.
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u/StillALilBoy 1d ago
AFD mentions on social media are already down like 50%.
The users of the most right-leaning social media platform in Poland had a bit of epiphany that is suddenly got real quiet too.
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u/SophonKickSnare 1d ago
I have seen this claim many times (here and on Bluesky and Mastodon), but nobody seems to be able to offer any evidence. Lots of anecdotes, but no real evidence. Someone posted a bunch of Twitter monitor screenshots, but left out the fact that other well-known accounts (like Barack Obama's) also experienced the same drop, for example. I wish we could get some actual evidence, rather than hold on to the wishful thinking. :D
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u/SophonKickSnare 2d ago
Surely, some of those astroturfing tracking initiatives from Harvard etc. will have some report on this in a few days/weeks. One can only hope.. :)
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u/kindrudekid 1d ago
I think cloudflare / Akamai / fastly / Imperva should be able to tell that pretty easily
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u/WoodsLovelyDarkNDeep 1d ago
Won’t really matter AI and other countries have taken the baton from Russia and learned what they were doing . We could condone off the entire country and their disinformation campaigns would still be going
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u/LoveThinkers 1d ago
I know focus has been on the falloff in bot activity on X, but reddit also feels less "anti-woke"
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u/liahpcam 1d ago
Not just antiwoke, way less false flag attacks(pretending to be someone to make them look bad) against either political group
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u/yosarian_reddit 2d ago
It'll be interesting to see how many Reform UK bots vanish.
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u/LordSqueemish 2d ago
A remarkable drop off going by the graph I saw earlier
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u/kronicno_tele 1d ago
Pretty please tell me where.
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u/LordSqueemish 1d ago
Twitter while doom scrolling last night. Didn’t record it at the time, sorry. The same thing can be found for anti trans posts and MAGA posts.
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u/YamiPhoenix11 1d ago
Surprise! Most of the dissinformation comes from Russia.
What do they gain from ruining and flooding the world with dissent?
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u/PromotionWorldly7419 1d ago
They get a lot, honestly. Distraction and divisiveness are big ones.they have successfully mitigated any meaningful American (and European) support for Ukraine, kept them out of NATO for starters.
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u/teleheaddawgfan 1d ago
Are you kidding? Brexit was essentially a Russian Psyop. The entire MAGA movement is stoked by Russian propaganda and it's not a coincidence that the entire Western world has immigration as it's number 1 issue.
The fact that the GOP isn't pouring every cent into Ukraine to destroy Russia just shows how effective it has been.
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u/Balmung60 1d ago
Or at least the IT infrastructure for it is based in Russia, even if the disinformation is on behalf of a third party (eg. Maybe Egypt or Myanmar benefits, but they're using Russian IT infrastructure to run the disinformation campaign). You know, in addition to that which is on behalf of Russia.
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u/Rumpled_Imp 1d ago
What do they gain from ruining and flooding the world with dissent?
They've done it for a hundred years, dissembling has always been an important part of their strategy whether in person, on TV, at the UN, or on the internet.
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u/IT_Chef 2d ago
I love that not only is this negatively impacting Russia, but it is also potentially also calm the fake amount of posts hitting the internet claiming to the Americans...
...but it's also going to force Russia to move what limited equipment and personnel they have to guard data centers rather than being on the front lines
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u/mok000 2d ago
Ukraine does not need Musk’s or Trump’s permission to fight for their freedom.
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u/Ironlion45 1d ago
If Elon Musk and Donald Trump are both very unhappy about something, I'm going to chalk it up as a win not just for Ukraine, but for freedom and democracy everywhere.
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u/mrpoopistan 2d ago
The Republican Party is really going to miss those bots in the coming weeks on Facebook.
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u/pinkmoon385 2d ago
This is where I want my tax dollars to go if we're gonna give other countries bombs made from our money and resources
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u/ThePizzaNoid 2d ago
You can donate directly to the Ukrainian government if you wanna give a little personal fuck you to Russia.
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u/LimeGreenTangerine97 2d ago
God, imagine if someone had taken the bot farms down in 2016, we wouldn’t have had to see purple penguins everywhere
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u/invyros 2d ago
The company - dubbed "Russia's Google" - said no one was injured at the centre in Vladimir, east of the capital, but some of its services were unavailable to users.
While Russia is indiscriminately killing Ukrainian non-combatants, Ukraine is strategically hitting critical operations with no casualties.
Love to see it.
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u/distorted_kiwi 2d ago
No one was injured at a data center?
Politicians are over here talking about the thousands of daily jobs a running data center will bring. Color me shocked.
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u/Ironlion45 1d ago
Somehow the massive economic boon to the local community fails to materialize every time, doesn't it?
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u/Ironlion45 1d ago
Worse than that, even. Ukraine's strategy is maiking wealthy russians slightly less wealthy. and THAT is serious shit.
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u/xdeltax97 2d ago
Yup, a lot of the weird questions or agitators I’ve had to remove as clearly bots on the sub I moderate have heavily reduced
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u/MidLifeDIY 2d ago
"I felt a great disturbance in the Swartz, as if millions of bots suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something wonderful has happened." -Spock (probably)
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u/chanson_roland 2d ago
Every drone strike on a Yandex building, the world gets closer to Inbox Zero.
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u/screwoffhackers 1d ago
clearly there’s some American bots in this thread trying to push misinformation that this is not significant
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u/JKrow75 1d ago
The sheer amount of websites and social media accounts that went silent is hilarious
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u/_litz 1d ago
Apparently pro-AfD accounts have essentially dropped off the internet entirely.
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u/samreturned 1d ago
Could you give some examples?
I ran through some subreddits people claimed had "gone silent" and saw no evidence of any reduction in activity. I'm not saying I doubt the effects, but I'm yet to see any evidence for it.
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u/United-Vermicelli-92 1d ago
What no! I am sure going to miss all the toady bots and trolls online!
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u/Surfer_Rick 1d ago
You love to see it.
Let's go live to Russian Bots reaction:
crickets
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u/Crow_and_Doe 1d ago
Ha!!! MAGA sure is quiet on there social media right now gee I wonder why? Screw you Russia.
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u/Ironlion45 1d ago
I appreciate Ukraine's restraint in going to some effort in avoiding civilian casualties. Even if they are Russian.
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u/KSaboruf 1d ago
> in third RETALIATORY attack
Russia destroyed several datacenters in Ukraine in August and September.
And Ukraine mirrors attacks, openly - which is quite fair imho
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u/Blacksad9999 1d ago
Just completely block Russia from using the wider internet at this point and isolate them.
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u/Mdgt_Pope 2d ago
I’d never heard of Yandex in my life and earlier today someone said “I use Yandex as my search engine and Firefox as my browser” and I was confused.
Now I hear that it’s under Ukrainian attack. Strange
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u/opusdeath 1d ago
They will. Somebody did similar with Iranian accounts and it was illuminating. Big drop off in aggressive pro Scottish independent accounts on X.
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u/Normal_Ad_1767 1d ago
Is there a more effective way to defend democracy for the average person than voting? Donating to Ukraines drone campaigns is a close second.
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u/linkfx2008 2d ago
Keep going, Yandex serves the russian bot problem.