icerat
Philosopher
If I say what I want to say I'll get banned from my own site and a visit from the SBU.
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Cont: The Russian Invasion of Ukraine part 9
- Thread starter Jimbo07
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- russia russia ukraine ukraine
Flo
Illuminator
Informed consent according to the Idiot-in-Chief : "I informed you that you do consent !"
Safe-Keeper
My avatar is not a Drumpf hat
Yeah, I wasn't being serious, of course it's a good thing they're hitting them. Give 'em hell.
Dr.Sid
Philosopher
Sure. I'm actually not convinced the trolls are gone. I haven't seen any quantified report on that. Only people saying "it seems so" and usually not even first hand. If that happened, it is very likely caused by the strikes.
Something like post analysis with timeline would make me happy.
dirtywick
Penultimate Amazing
- Joined
- Sep 12, 2006
- Messages
- 12,875
just to be clear, are you saying that you don't believe there are right wing russian propaganda bots active on social media? or simply that destroying russian data centers didn't have any effect on their operations? i think that's been proven pretty conclusively over the years, and obviously there's some infrastructure tied to running those operations
Aridas
Crazy Little Green Dragon
Not really the claim, incidentally. It would be closer to say that claim is that their operations were disrupted and that the disruption was quite noticable from the outside, but that the trolls are already coming back as they manage to adapt.
On a quick look, I came up with this analysis of the subject.
Did Ukraine’s strikes on data centers really silence Russian bots?
Personally, I'm willing to agree that what's been offered is not completely solid proof beyond any possible doubt. With that said, it's an eminently reasonable position to hold absent any decent counter-evidence. After all, Russia's long been strongly and solidly tied with efforts to push Far Right propaganda across the board and this would hardly be the first time that disruptions to Russia had a very noticeable effect. For example, I recall that earlier in the war, when some of the bank sanctions went into effect, far right propaganda and engagement numbers dropped precipitously in many countries. A bunch of efforts similar to that mentioned in the link were likely disrupted then, after all -
It was a very temporary relief, but notable and entirely in line with the very reasonable interpretation that Russian propagandist insanity was disrupted by the Yandex strikes.
Dr.Sid
Philosopher
"I'm actually not convinced the trolls are gone" .. I can't make it any more clear, sorry.
Dr.Sid
Philosopher
I want it to be true. It would be great if strikes could achieve this. It just doesn't pass my standard of source reliability.
Aridas
Crazy Little Green Dragon
*shrug* Okay. This is one of those things that is actually rather low impact, either way. Whether it's true or not is actually of rather limited value - there's plenty of more solid evidence for the meaningful premises, after all. It's a safe bet, in short. It just doesn't pass your standards? Fair enough. Doesn't really change anything meaningful.
With that said, the way you say this does feel off. It would be great if strikes could achieve this? There's no good reason to doubt that taking out infrastructure causes disruptions to things that were using that infrastructure. I don't really count it as a "great" thing, primarily because of the sheer amount of collateral damage, but there's little cause to doubt that it is a thing.
Dr.Sid
Philosopher
Misinformation is behind a lot of damage. Trump, Brexit, rise of populism and extremism in Europe, separatism in Ukraine .. who knows how things would shape without information warfare. The West is still underestimating it IMHO.
Aridas
Crazy Little Green Dragon
Sure. Standards certainly are important, as I agreed. Yet, there is a serious problem if your standards are such that you end up arguing things like "Does taking out infrastructure really cause disruptions to the things that were using that infrastructure?" That is a way that your response here could reasonably be taken, after all, given how you seem to be offering little more than a dodge and not even acknowledging that that what relevant point could be taken from that had already been granted. That's a yellow flag in and of itself.
Of more import, I think, is how your arguments seem to keep being off and seem to be rather focused on a straw man. Things like "I'm actually not convinced the trolls are gone." Seriously, did anyone actually really say that the trolls are gone? Is anyone trying to convince you that they're gone? Not that I saw, though I admit that I could have missed something. icerat certainly didn't say that. Safe-keeper didn't say that. I certainly didn't say that. "Are gone" implies a significantly more permanent situation, after all, and not one where those in question were already being observed to have begun returning to action in the cited information. You could claim semantics here, I suppose, "were gone for a short time" or "were affected at all" would fit far safer points of doubt to raise, but I'm not actually particularly intent upon putting words into your mouth, so you would need to be the one to properly say so.
Going past that, though, I feel like stressing that your whole objection here is off. What's been repeatedly made clear is that there is reasonable cause and evidence to think something, but that rock solid proof is not currently available - and that that's fine to keep in mind. As it so happens, it's extremely unlikely that pretty much any of us will face any situation where that information should meaningfully affect any decisions that we face, nor does it particularly meaningfully add to the already well established facts of Russian involvement with and promotion of the Far Right, so there's very little point at all in making a fuss to try to solely emphasize the rock solid proof not currently available part there as you have been - unless you actually have an ulterior motive in play to try to downplay it, rather than simply let it rest in a state of reasonable, but could possibly be incorrect. I suggest that you more carefully consider how you proceed, at this point.
There's a whole can of worms there, really, not least because the far right organizations that Russia's been supporting are also quite inclined and motivated to weaponize misinformation even without Russia and are happy to play along and provide cover as they aid, abet, and produce plenty more themselves with all the consequences that result. This likely isn't a particularly appropriate thread to do a deep dive there, though.
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dudalb
Penultimate Amazing
Re the Disel Deal: You expect any thing different from Benedict Donald?
Helen
Implicitly explicit
Yes, since when does the rapist-in-chief ever ask anyone for consent?
dirtywick
Penultimate Amazing
- Joined
- Sep 12, 2006
- Messages
- 12,875
but it's not at all clear what you mean by gone and you could make it more clear. the claim is they were temporarily disrupted due to the data center outage and during this time people claim to have noticed less right wing propaganda on popular right wing social media sites, however traffic was restored hours later
Wudang
BOFH
In the comments for one of many "social experiments " I saw where people were posting factual statements that usually attract trolls and bots, eg "vaccines work", "nato wasn't expanding, countries wanted to join it they were scared Russia would invade ", etc : the bits and trolls are still often there but they've lost the tools that let them find their targets.
From this we can infer that entities that have suddenly dropped massively in activity used yandex , not google etc. And their use of yandex implies they are not based in America, UK, Europe, Australia etc as many accounts claim.
From this we can infer that entities that have suddenly dropped massively in activity used yandex , not google etc. And their use of yandex implies they are not based in America, UK, Europe, Australia etc as many accounts claim.
Andy_Ross
Penultimate Amazing
- Joined
- Jun 2, 2010
- Messages
- 86,442
Russia's offensive ability is broken, Kyiv's former top general tells BBC.
Ukraine has stabilised the front line and "broken Russia's ability to advance" by killing so many of its men, Ukraine's former commander-in-chief has said in an interview with the BBC
www.bbc.co.uk
Ukraine has stabilised the front line and "broken Russia's ability to advance" by killing so many of its men, Ukraine's former commander-in-chief has said in an interview with the BBC
Russia's offensive ability is broken, Kyiv's former top general tells BBC
In his first interview since being forced from his post, Gen Syrskyi speaks about Ukraine's future in the war.
www.bbc.co.uk
icerat
Philosopher
I've tried X analytics with different terms and the variability is so great hard to conclude anything. News cycles remain the key driver, and only a few weeks data is available to query. A surprise to me is actually how few posts there are. A simple search for "Ukraine" for example finds usual traffic of only about 50000 posts/replies a day. That's really not that many out of a site claiming 550 million monthly active users.
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