Reform figures see social media engagement drop as bot accounts 'fall silent'
www.thelondoneconomic.com
The social media engagement on posts from Reform UK figures appears to have dropped in the wake of Ukrainian strikes on Russian data centres.

cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/11858823

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Over the weekend, Ukraine carried out a co-ordinated drone strike against several major Russian data centres. This completely decimated Russia’s Yandex, … which controls more than 70% of search traffic in the country, and has reportedly resulted in a dramatic fall in bot traffic from the Yandex network.

As per the bot analysts at Tom’s Hardware, bot traffic from the Yandex network has dropped to just 0.4% of the maximum number of HTTP requests recorded in the past two weeks. That means activity from automated, Russian-hosted accounts has been virtually eliminated on social media.

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As a result, the social media engagement on posts from [far-right] Reform UK figures appears to have dropped in the wake of Ukrainian strikes on Russian data centres.

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There has already been a strong and significant impact on bot traffic in countries such as France and Germany.

David Colon, a French information operations researcher, has noted a huge difference in the performance of narratives generated by the Russia-linked information operations group, Storm-1516.

The silencing of the bots also appears to have caused a dramatic drop in activity around Germany’s far-right AfD…

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Amongst others, the article is citing Britain’s Reform politician Richard Tice. Three posts on X from the Reform deputy leader to his almost 400,000 followers on Monday, 11 October [hadn’t] 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.

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A similar pattern can be seen when it comes to other far-right figures such as Nigel Farage [the linked article is given evidence about that].

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As Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky himself said after the strikes on Russian data centres, it’s suddenly become a “little easier to breathe” on social media.

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Archived

  • A_A@lemmy.worldEnglish
    31·
    1 day ago

    No. But i wonder if a measurable effect of the strikes will be visible anywhere on the fediverse and for which accounts if so.

    Edit : i can’t see anything on :
    https://fedilist.com/
    either…

      • A_A@lemmy.worldEnglish
        11·
        24 hours ago

        ok, i see where you stand. i like the answer you were given to that comment you linked.

        This seems to be a developing story … maybe we will know more in a few days.

        • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlEnglish
          21·
          24 hours ago

          icymi i edited my comment there to add a link to my other comment (in this thread) discussing the article the person replying to me links (which is the same article this thread links to).

          (i can’t reply to them because their comment doesn’t exist on my instance, because they were banned long ago; i see in the modlog that they’re banned from other instances also for vote manipulation)

          This seems to be a developing story … maybe we will know more in a few days.

          if you do find the evidence for this story which i’ve been looking for and not finding, please, let me know here!

          • A_A@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            23 hours ago

            Thanks, in the coming days, if i find anything, i will come back here.

      • A_A@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        23 hours ago

        this site is frozen for me, again.

        i was searching for a site that says if there is a change in traffic at a given instance, i failed in this search.