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[–] 86 points 5 days ago (13 children)

I've seen a number of news articles disproving this recent viral claim - saying the "bots" traffic lost was just the equivalent of Russia's Google's crawlers. Honestly though, beyond occasional use of Lemmy, I don't use any social media so I have no experience as to things feeling different.

Is it actually quieter out there or is it just wishful thinking?

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  • [–] 30 points 5 days ago (4 children)

    I wouldn't be surprised if there was an initial down spike but realistically they'd just spin up the bots somewhere else basically immediately.

    Like a lot of what a data center does is act as a glorified router. You'd need to take out a server that just so happened to host some bot code that somehow isn't stored anywhere else for the effects to be permanent...

    Or other countries actually stop taking Russian money. One of the two.

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  • [–] 10 points 4 days ago* (3 children)

    I'd imagine most bots originate from compromised Pcs and other IoT devices and the servers are just coordinators.

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  • [–] 6 points 4 days ago (2 children)

    My understanding is in those cases the troll farms are routing traffic through the devices, not running bots on the device itself, but I guess I wouldn't be particularly surprised if that could work too.

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  • [–] 7 points 4 days ago (1 child)

    So, the data center attacks could slow or stop the flow of traffic, regardless of how many devices are compromised?

    Regardless, Russian data centers are viable targets for Ukraine. Behind military and oil infrastructure, of course, but still viable targets.

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  • [–] 10 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (2 children)

    Those articles don't debunk shit, they just explain that the data on the charts is web crawlers. Nobody but platform owners can effectively estimate the amount of bot traffic they have - and even if they can distinguish today, cause with AIs it's really complicated.

    So we just don't have the stats, but it doesn't mean people can't use personal perception. And yes, xitter is a lot cleaner now.

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  • [–] 8 points 4 days ago

    What the article really does is challenge the notion that bot behavior on social media is down as there is a significant lack of evidence. The burden of proof lies with the one who makes the claim, in this case, a European Parliament MP and the Ukrainian government (namely: Zelensky who repeated the claim).

    As there is no evidence yet, and the only 'evidence' being touted so far does not in fact show what they say it does, the notion is falsified until further evidence is provided.

    I'm sure people are happy to think social media has been 'cleaned up' a lot more, but I have yet to see any verified and reliable evidence that isn't just 'well I feel like'.

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  • [–] 13 points 4 days ago

    There is a real tangible drop. But it's also limited in scope.

    So where the bots focused yeah it was night and day different. But over all? Really kind of a drop in the bucket.

    So personal experience just varies wildly based on where online you hang out.

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  • [–] 41 points 5 days ago (7 children)

    I've been to far too many Thanksgiving dinners that disprove this hypothesis.

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  • [–] 9 points 5 days ago (2 children)

    Thanksgiving (Canada) Annual holiday in October Thanksgiving or Thanksgiving Day, is an annual Canadian holiday held on the second Monday in October.

    I’ll believe you.

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  • [–] 8 points 4 days ago (3 children)

    Yeah... these people do exist, and there are WAY WAY more of them than we ever realized.

    The old conventional knowledge - that people become more liberal and open minded over time and the bigots are a loud minority? Yeah... that turned out to be completely wrong. Whatever else you believe, continuing the nonsense pretense that these shitheads don't actually exist is wishful thinking.

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  • [–] 12 points 4 days ago (2 children)

    The old conventional knowledge - that people become more liberal and open minded over time

    Huh? It's always been considered the opposite.

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  • [–] 4 points 4 days ago (1 child)

    I don't mean at an individual level - I meant at a societal level. The idea has always been that younger generations become increasingly open minded and liberal as time goes on and that we'd reached a tipping point where tribal, bigoted views could never be the majority again.

    That was a HUGE mistake of complacency, and quite possibly a fatal one for multicultural democracy.

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  • [–] 5 points 4 days ago

    Ah, I misunderstood. Yeah, there was an assumption that Z and Alpha would be more and more progressive, but not enough people paid enough attention to the capture of large parts of those groups by conservatives.

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  • [–] 7 points 4 days ago* (1 child)

    I mean you can be propagandized into many of those beliefs if you never try to verify anything you're told.

    But it'll be a cold day in hell before anyone tells me Elon Musk is handsome.

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  • [–] 8 points 5 days ago (2 children)

    Huh... Doesn't this imply that Comic PizzaCake exists as a representation of PizzaCake's interaction with the Internet?

    As opposed to existing with a seperate fictionalized world that is.

    Meta.

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  • [–] 5 points 4 days ago

    Ok, Pizza has been less lame lately. Before the comics were obvious things everyone agrees with, and basically the same comic over and over.

    Now she is getting more and more interesting.

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  • [–] 4 points 4 days ago

    Idk if this is the first time I noticed or if she tweaked her artstyle a bit, but those noses make me think of movies like A Goofy Movie or the like

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  • [–] 1 point 5 days ago* (3 children)

    that seems to confirm what have been thinking for a while. Not denying there are not some nazi scum (look at the white house). But the vast majority of the nazi scum doesn't exist. It's virtual nazis everywhere to help pushing the agenda of soon-to-be-dead-and-forgotten old boomer scum.

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  • [–] 20 points 5 days ago* (2 children)

    God I wish this was true. If you live in a reality where those around you have not been sucked into the MAGA cult shit and this all seems like some far away conspiracy I genuinely envy you. My extended family ranging from 25-80 nearly all without exception are MAGA fuckwits. It's an extremely lonely and frustrating reality. There are plenty of young MAGA twats and this IS NOT going away with the death of boomers and without a fight.

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  • [–] 0 points 5 days ago (1 child)

    I have a couple of þem in my family, too. Þe correlation between religion and MAGA is really strong in our case; I don't know how it is for þe rest of you.

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  • [+] -12 points 4 days ago*

    Please tag these with the authors name so I don’t see them from my filter.

    What an original and deep comic 🙄

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  • [+] -9 points 4 days ago* (6 children)

    More low hanging fruit from the queen of cringe.

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  • [–] 5 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 child)

    Bruh this is like the 5th poster i blocked for posting Pizza Cake. Any criticism of her gets you banned and most comments are just vitriol so i rather just block her comics but everyday new accounts pop up and this is the second in a day so im kinda fried from her flamebait comics.

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  • [–] 5 points 4 days ago (3 children)
  • [+] -13 points 5 days ago* (1 child)

    At the least I don't have to read that narrative longer here😭
    Just because I hate electoralism & empires, doesn't make me a Yandex LLM.😭

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