Despite multiple Ukrainian strikes hitting Yandex servers in Russia, a thread by antibot4navalny, which has long tracked state-sponsored social media campaigns and troll farms, explains that the Cloudflare “Bot Traffic” chart many people have cited is really about automated web crawlers operated by Yandex accessing the web.
It’s not connected to “bots” posting on social media, and Russian bot/crawler traffic overall continues to be about the same as normal. Still, are you noticing any difference in the posts and comments you’ve seen online?
[Media: https://bsky.app/profile/antibot4navalny.bsky.social/post/3mxmv7t6nxc27]
Okay, so if you’re running VPNs everywhere, guess what? Those are just servers, so you may as well just run the bots directly there because the traffic looks the same either way.
And you seem to be saying that the best way for Russia to hide its activity is to have all the activity originate in Russia where its vulnerable to attacks like this?
Remember, this is a state actor. They have access to more ressources than even the largest companies in the world. There are certainly teams and likely organizations dedicated to spreading propaganda on social media. It would be very naive to assume that’s not happening, and that it’s just Russia doing it.