This was one of the biggest misinformation/propaganda campaigns I’ve ever seen.
I won’t blame Zelenskyy for the claims, he’s at war and propaganda is a powerful tool. But the rest of the world just casually pilling on without verifying anything? (Including many well known and trusted news networks and big names). Absolutely unacceptable.
Anyone who works in internet infrastructure should have been shutting this theory down from the start, but because the misinformation is “good”, everyone’s fine with it somehow.
This event really made me lose faith in the world’s news organizations.
Hell, right below this post is another one talking about all the Russian bots who have disappeared and all the comments are “confirming” it.
I have the impression that there was some impact, but that it was less general and much shorter than when the Russian ira was temporarily shut down around the 2018 midterms. Maybe the effect was bigger + longer on sites with more account security like Facebook, but i don’t use any, so I wouldn’t know.
hum… now LemmyGrad.ml ?
https://fedidb.com/servers/lemmygrad.ml
is it down for other users as it is for me ?Unfortunatley latestagecapitalism and it’s two prominent russian trolls are still going strong. u/saltyamerican and u/godlesscommie. Too bad.
If you’re not feeling a community, just block it. You can always undo it later.
You know, I don’t believe there are so many Russian bots astroturfing the Internet. There are plenty of regular humans who truly believe Russia is doing nothing but defend itself, in “aggressive NATO expansion”, and a whole generally anti-West attitude.
They hate America for being an imperialist power, which… Yeah. Absolutely. But then in the same breath state Russia isn’t, and that they’re nothing more than a victim of said Imperialism.
Consider this an anecdote, but I have family who says these things. Bots need not apply.
They aren’t meant to be the star of the show. Their purpose is to be in the crowd and agitate. They’re the devil that whispers people’s ear.
Bots would have proven to the a failure if a botnet went down and culture wars vanished. Their intention is to manipulate people. Not to wholesale substitute to the population.
Besides the name itself seems to go over heads. Bot farms don’t operate out of a centralized server. They’re not even bots literally. These operations are farmed out to locations around the world. Sometimes they’re real human trolls.
But there don’t need to be trolls, or people deliberately put there by Russia to spread propaganda. There are plenty of people that already do this out of their own accord. Mostly the kind that also believe in other dumb things.
And it makes perfect sense that before reading this many people felt that they clearly see Russian bots vanishing.
Human psychology is just not equipped for open Web. Especially social media kind of it. F2F and personal webpages and circles of friends are fine, but anything crowd-related is worse than sending pigeons.
