- cross-posted to:
- politics
- cross-posted to:
- politics
A coordinated online campaign has reportedly encouraged users to alter fuel station information on digital maps across Russia, creating confusion among drivers.
The activity involves changing station statuses by marking locations with available fuel as empty or showing closed stations as operational.
Supporters of the campaign claim the effort is designed to disrupt travel decisions, increase uncertainty, and create additional pressure around fuel availability.
As I’ve said in the other thread, realistically it only diverts from hate towards their own government for failing to protect critical infrastructure, and onto Ukrainian people who went out of their way to ruin someone’s day. Realistically, the economic damage is like wasting 10 minutes of a few people who will drive to an empty station, find none, then go to another station. And maybe like an hour of site admins time to ban and clear those trolls out, which I’m pretty sure they already did. And then those annoyed few will open the news and see a written confession from those trolls that they will do absolutely anything to ruin any random russian’s day, just because, and cheers from clueless folk in the comments below. Do you think seeing this would rile those russians against Putin, or make them support him even more?
I mean as a parallel situation, Iran closing the straight and raising gas prices for me certainly didn’t make me back Trump or dislike Iran more. I blame Trump for that. I think any reasonable person can see that a country who’s being invaded doing whatever they can to fuck with the invader is the invader’s fault. Maybe not everything will be totally effective but smaller/weaker nations have to get their shots in however they can.
You went a bit short in your analogy. US and Iran are both governments duking it out, and it’s completely normal to blame Trump for failing to duke it out in his favor. But what if on top of that and the resulting gas price increases, Iranian activists and supporters decided to, IDK, hack and DDoS EV charger maps or something. You’d be completely reasonable in being more suspicious of your Iranian-American neighbors, remote coworkers, or taxi drivers, be more receptive to anti-immigration policies, as who knows what else they might pull off, and, if you’re in position of power, like customs officer, policeman, or just corporate HR, to question them more than others, and as a site admin to just block the entire IP range of the country. This results in life for said Iranians being just a tad more difficult, but they themselves probably fled Ayatollah regime a long time ago and just want to live in piece for once. If that happened I’d condemn it as well and call them shitters too. I myself dislike Israel and could in theory make calls to Israeli businesses and make bomb threats, but then I’d be a shitter myself as this would only make life of my Russian Jew friends more difficult for little economic impact.