this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2026
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[–] mysteryhumpf@feddit.org 26 points 15 hours ago (4 children)

To be clear four days later there is still zero evidence this is true.

[–] UiUiUiUiUi@piefed.nl 28 points 11 hours ago (3 children)
[–] mysteryhumpf@feddit.org 1 points 4 hours ago

Cherry picking individuals with low engagement is not a serious analysis.

[–] roofuskit@lemmy.world 15 points 11 hours ago (3 children)
[–] UiUiUiUiUi@piefed.nl 19 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago) (1 children)

Tomshardware doesn't show twitter account changes it talks about cloudflare traffic and expert opinions but thelondoneconimoc has a better article on the effects on e.g. Reform’s twitter.

Edit:

Here’s a quote from my above source

Take Richard Tice for example. Below are three posts on X from the Reform deputy leader to his almost 400,000 followers on Monday, 11 October. At the time of writing, none of the posts had hit triple figures for reposts or comments, with one not even reaching 10,000 views.

{...}

Before the Ukrainian strikes on the Russia data centres, Tice’s posts got considerably more engagement, consistently hitting triple figures for comments and reposts, whilst racking up hundreds of thousands of views.

[–] A_A@lemmy.world 1 points 16 minutes ago* (last edited 12 minutes ago)

typo : "thelondoneconimoc"
(( thanks for many nice and well documented comments ))

[–] dfyx@piefed.social 14 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (3 children)

Which gives exactly no evidence of a decline in social media bots.

If you actually click the source link in the article, you see that the graph shows the bot traffic from "AS13238 YANDEX — Yandex LLC", not the internet overall. That caption was conveniently cropped. Also, those bots are very likely not the kind that post on twitter but web crawlers. Yandex is a search engine. Of course destroying its data centers stops the web crawlers running in those data centers from indexing sites.

I have yet to see an actual statistic of the amount political social media posts or active users on social media sites changing in any way.

Edit: claiming that this attack has destroyed the bot farms and giving mislabeled graphs as sources is actively harmful because it leads people to believe that everything that is left must be "real people" when it's very likely that pretty much all of the bots are still active.

[–] roofuskit@lemmy.world 2 points 6 hours ago

That's why asked, because the cited source doesn't make the same claims.

[–] queermunist@lemmy.ml 6 points 8 hours ago

It doesn't matter. People have already made up their minds, facts are irrelevant.

[–] BlindPenguin@piefed.social 2 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

Yandex also offers Cloud Services. Just saying...

[–] dfyx@piefed.social 6 points 7 hours ago

Okay, good. Now show me the statistics that show that there are actually fewer bots than last week.

Don't get me wrong, I desperately want these news to be true. But so far every single article I've seen links back (directly or indirectly) to that one CloudFlare chart that doesn't say what people think it says. Some point to a few individual posts that didn't get many interactions. But as far as I'm aware nobody has made the effort to check if there is an actual widespread difference and which topics it affects. Right now this all seems like confirmation bias and wishful thinking. And again, I get it. We need good news now more than ever. But the only thing worse than no good news is good news that just isn't true and leads to us letting our guard down.

[–] SethW@lemmy.world 7 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (1 children)

From how it was explained to me by colleagues that work with this stuff for us is that those data centers were links in a chain of vpns that many bot swarms used and when they went down their ip addresses were reveled and on many platforms that resulted in automated bans and THAT is the subjective experience of the bots being silenced

[–] mysteryhumpf@feddit.org 2 points 4 hours ago

There is also zero evidence for this