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.

Yeah it was web crawlers, but a person can dream.

I find it funny that these articles were posted in the SHITPOSTING communities and people took them seriously, which is honestly pretty common behavior in the.. S-H-I-T P-O-S-T-I-N-G communities. I don't go to aneurysmposting to complain that the posts are hard to understand..

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.

But the unsourced graph said it did!

Extremely lazy copy paste:

Did “Russian bot traffic” really disappear after Ukrainian strikes on Yandex servers?

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 overallcontinues to be about the same as normal. Still, are you noticing any difference in the posts and comments you’ve seen online?

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines

No one will learn anything from this.

Certain reddit communities gotta be a ghost town now