Ukraine did not Stop the Russian Bots

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Transcript:

No, Ukraine wiping out Russian data centers did not, in fact, lead to a direct reduction in the number of MAGA and other rightwing fascists’ posts on social media. Sorry. That did not happen.

I’ve been sitting on this story for a number of days, now, because honestly I just find it so incredibly depressing. I think I got depressed the very first time it crossed my own social media feed, which, judging by my first bookmark of such a thing was this reposting of a post originally posted to Xitter by an EU parliamentarian, who wrote “If confirmed, this is telling: Russian data centres get hit, and online activity around AfD suddenly plummets. So much talk about German patriotism... then the connection from Russia goes down.”

“AfD” is the MAGA-esque German far-right party. He includes a screenshot of bot activity over time, with what appears to be a dramatic drop in traffic around October 11, the day that for the third and final time in the span of a few days, Ukrainian drones attacked the data center for Yandex, colloquially known as “Russia’s Google.”

This was reposted on Bluesky with the message, “We’ve been talking about this for years.

None of these far-right movements are organic.”

Which is true, in a sense, and yet my first thought upon seeing that post, with 20,000 likes, was “bullshit.” And then I looked at who was reposting it, and was completely unsurprised to see that it was @angrystaffer, a user that winks at being one of those anonymous “alt” accounts from inside the Trump administration but isn’t. Even in admitting they aren’t, over on their Patreon, their outdated bio reads “I am not a current White House Staffer, and I do not - and will not -discuss anything classified on this forum or anywhere else.”

Hey, same here, everybody. I’m also not a “current” White House Staffer and I will NOT discuss anything classified, no matter how much you beg and no matter how much cool classified shit I secretly know.

This being the poster going viral is unsurprising because this is the exact kind of baloney I highlighted last year: wannabe influencers cosplaying as important people in the “resistance” who hold secret information and power, and who are organizing a rebellion behind the scenes that will take down Donald Trump and his cronies any day now.

These accounts got popular for the same reason that 9/11 truthers got popular, and for the same reason that antivaccine lunatics got popular, and for the same reason that Donald Trump got popular: all of these people have a fantasy to sell, and there is an audience desperate to buy it. Yes, misinformation and disinformation tend to mostly be weaponized by the rightwing, but the reason why it spreads is apolitical. When people are scared, when they do not have confidence in institutions and community, when they feel like they lack control over their lives, they fall back into the sweet comfort of fantasy and superstition. 

The world is wildly fucked up right now. For many of us, and I include myself in this cohort, we are scared, seeing the rampant spread of mis- and disinformation online, and we are frustrated by our lack of ability to stop it. This makes us much more likely to cling to any story that gives us a semblance of hope, and it makes us less likely to seek out the facts that might dispute those stories. Ironically, that means we are more likely to spread false stories about the defeat of disinformation. The human brain, am I right? Incredible that we made it this far.

I’m often asked how I hone my own beliefs and keep myself from falling for bullshit as best I can. My number one answer is this: if I want it to be true, I need to spend more time making sure it IS true.

And so, I would LOVE for it to be true that Ukraine’s bombing of the Yandex data centers resulted in an immediate drop in far-right disinformation agents online, and that’s why I took an extra second to think about it. Do I really think that a fairly sophisticated network of disinformation agents are dependent upon one data center in Russia, and that if they are they wouldn’t immediately pivot to some other method? No. I don’t think that. And so instead of hitting that “repost” button, I waited for the online misinformation researchers to do their thing. And sure enough, they did.

One of the first things I learned, thanks to a well-written piece in the German monthly magazine Capital, was that the graph posted by that Czech politician wasn’t made by him. The one that he posted, which shows AfD posts over the past three months, cuts off something important that was there in the original, which was posted on Threads: KI-inhalt, which means “AI generated.” Even without that label, eagle-eyed viewers might have seen something was amiss, considering that the graph was posted on October 11th yet the graph itself shows bot activity up to October 15th. Small detail, there.

Capital spoke to several misinformation researchers, who confirmed that there was no significant change in the number of far-right AfD posts on social media. They explain that similar charts shared on social media, like this one from Cloudflare showing a drop in bot traffic following the bombing, is not about “bots” on social media but “bots” as in automatic web crawlers, because Yandex is a search engine and search engines use bots to index webpages.

A few days later, Cloudflare confirmed this with their own investigation and blog post: Yandex has two ASNs, or ​​autonomous system numbers. One is for their search capabilities, which showed a “drop in traffic (that) consisted almost entirely of verified search crawlers indexing web pages, images, and site resources.”

The other is their cloud service, of which Cloudflare reported, “There was a decline in malicious activities like vulnerability scanning and probing, but high-volume automation did not vanish — it simply migrated to other hosting providers.”

To further explain those cloud bots, Cloudflare states that they “looked more like software apps: nearly two-thirds of their requests sent data to websites, some identified themselves as JavaScript, Python, or Go programs.”

No traffic to social media could be measured.

It’s actually very interesting to see what happened to these malicious app bots. Cloudflare looked specifically at bots targeting gambling websites, and saw that as Yandex went down, bot traffic immediately rose on other companies’ ASNs, with the requests they were making identical to those that were now gone from Yandex.

Cloudflare’s takeaway is important: “Physical infrastructure is static, but malicious automation is built to move.”

And that’s just when we’re talking about BOT bots: literal bits of code flying around the internet looking for insecurities to exploit. When I talk about the problem of “bots” spreading misinformation on social media, I’m talking about something much more complicated. You might have noticed that in my last video about the “bots” that manipulated people into hating Blake Lively on behalf of Justin Baldoni, I took a moment to clarify that I’d be talking about inauthentic users. “Bot” is much easier to say, but as you can see it can get a little confusing if you don’t know the definitions people are using: a bot that tells a Twitch streamer when they get a new subscriber? A bot that indexes webpages for search engines? A bot that scans webpages for vulnerabilities and then exploits them? A bot that mimics a human by linking to a website in the comments of an unlocked Wordpress blog? Or an actual human, who creates social media profiles en masse and uses an algorithm to post identical content that links back between them?

In those latter cases, “bot” simply means inauthentic behavior that attempts to mimic real human behavior on social media, and there are so many ways to do this that unfortunately you can’t just bomb a few data centers in Russia and call it a day. Instead, you have to stay aware of the fact that someone may be trying to manipulate you, and the easiest way to do that is to say something you want to hear. So if you see a post online that jibes with your worldview and your desires, take an extra minute to think about it before you share it with others, especially if it’s “political.” Because everything is “political.” 

Ukraine did not Stop the Russian Bots (YouTube)