Link: https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/politics/reform-figures-see-social-media-engagement-drop-after-strikes-on-russia-data-centres-410517/

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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

There’s a lot to thank Ukraine for.

Hopefully this helps the US midterms as well. The US citizenry has proven themselves to be very susceptible to Russian influence, and on the right they're basically happy to be dominated by it. Less bullshit botnet noise is better for everyone.

I didn't realize they were playing 5d chess with those strikes

Might actually be politically way more impactful than expected

I wonder if this makes all of the other bot activity visible too. I guess that's for the following days to see...

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.

this article is hilariously mistaken about what the "bot analysts at Tom's Hardware" are actually showing 🤣

Another lm account playing down the reality.

The http requests are one piece of information in in this article. There is much more than this, and the entire investigation provides strong evidence that the European far-right's media engagement dropped significantly due to the elimination of Russian bots.

The same appears to be true here on Lemmy as many users in other threads have also said. It shows once again that tankie and the far-right are more similar than they would admit?