You really should mention chef-cum-media-mogul-cum-PMC-commander Prigozhin by name.

Yevheniy Prigozhin, of Wagner PMC fame lately (and ultimately):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yevgeny_Prigozhin

> Not sure if troll farms got affected in any way, that is a different business entirely, no overlap.

Was a different business. Before the "consensual" takeover.

After the takeover, there's only one business that matters: do what they tell you.

funny that you didn’t call out Prihozin

Either Ukraine was aiming exactly for that or it is just a coincidence and Ukraine is going to exploit it further because reducing Russian bot activity will reduce visibility for parties which are openly hostile to Ukraine (like AfD) which reduces their ability to get into power.

With some analysis, it might be possible to figure out which accounts were Russian trolls by comparing tweet frequency with the timing of these bombings.

There's of course the obvious, low effort trolling, but I'd think there are also more subtle, maybe more intellectually equipped information warfare going on.

Same in Germany : AFD's activity went abruptly down apparently.

A German friend said support for the AfD completely evaporated. Gone.

I hate Russia with a passion and strongly support Ukraine, but this kind of convenient narrative always makes me suspicious. (I use Twitter daily and haven't necessarily noticed anything.)

Reminds me of when 4channers said 4chan's daily interracial posting went way down on October 7, 2023. (It didn't.)

I could believe this, but not before I see a good empirical analysis. Until then, it just feels like typical folk gossip.

I would love to see less shit posts here as well

I've actually seen less controversial comments here on HN as well.

What about true social?

Is this sarcasm? You don't see a lack of something. That's what it means. To prove a reduction you have to look at aggregate statistics and sentiment analysis.

Multiple drone strikes, against three different data centers.

It is a very hard time to do this sort of study with APIs and scraping not being available to the labs that would actually want to study this.

My guess would be that there will be a significant change detected but Russian troll farms are not totally datacenter operated - it's still mostly ran by real office workers like in 1984. That being said, you still need datacenter compute for organizing even manual operations like this.

I'd like to see this data too. What report would you recommend?

Exactly what I think is happening here, confusion between web crawler bots and the other sort of bots.

How do you know that?

Those CF country stats are certifiably useless. They only know the last hop. We know that consumer routers and web browser extensions are vulnerable. There are plenty of ways to bounce malicious traffic through assumed-organic hosts. These are almost impossible to track, especially with the prevalence of CGNAT.

No serious person would ever claim that Russian cyber influence operations were sending traffic directly from Russian IP addresses. That's 'Get Smart' levels of absurdity. It's as ridiculous as a Russian spy pretending to be an American while speaking with a thick Russian accent.

As the other commenter said, not helpful. If you go with cf countries, Germany is one of the worst offenders. But only because it has Frankfurt as a big traffic node and lots of hosting providers.

It's actually incredible how terrible google images seems in comparison. Yandex is just so, so good for reverse image search

They could be dead you know. I wouldn't joke around, we're all in the same business after all. I'm sure the SRE's didn't decide who rented space in their DC.

They do. Yandex has been holding periodic "datacenter offline" exercises for a while.

I’m afraid it’s going to be a popular runbook if ppl don’t get their shit together quickly.

I’m sure I’m wrong, but I remember reading about lasers being used as a cost effective defense mechanism

Something like https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-military-laser-shoots-down-c...

> these days it shows how terrifying drones are as weapons.

They aren't fundamentally different from a bunch of assholes sitting in an airplane 25,000 feet above you, flying above the ceiling of your flak and air interceptors, dropping a few thousand tons of firebombs on your town.

> I'm curious about how to defend against such drones.

Looking at what most of their targets have in common, I'd say that there's an easy answer to that - don't start wars.

I haven't seen this effect documented but if it isn't being documented it really needs to be. We need to get -very- mad about the soft wars being waged right now and the first step is to understand the extent of what is going on and by who. We all know that bots are driving a massive amount of engagement right now. It is rare though to see such direct causal proof of where it is coming from.

Curious where it’s being documented - this is a fascinating study (who knows how long time period to measure its impact will last) - do you have links?

Would you mind posting at least one link? If it's actually documented across the internet, this should take you no time. A bunch of anecdotes does not count, though.

Can someone post the actual data sources for this ? I keep seeing people claim this and even post graphs, but 0 sources.

Source: trust me bro

Activists? You think the Russian propaganda machine can be defeated by activists?