• underisk@lemmy.ml
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    1 day ago

    Bot traffic is down: meaning the bots that Yandex used to index webpages for their search engine. The article doesn’t take very long to make that point; you could have just skimmed it to see that (I did).

    So it’s true, but not in the way people mean it when they say “all the russian bots are gone!”.

    • Bane_Killgrind@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      19 hours ago

      It has led to something of a trend on X, in which users post what they call a “bot test”: an opinion or claim of the kind that would ordinarily lead to an influx of automated responses. Some users do indeed claim that they have seen a substantial reduction in the number of replies of a certain kind, and use that to suggest both that the previous responses were from automated accounts and that those accounts have reduced in number.

      Idk this is fairly uncomplicated.

      As such, those widely shared charts do not in themselves suggest that there will be any less activity from automated systems that post on social media. And there is nothing necessarily to suggest that the attacks have had any impact in that way at all

      Oooooohhhh the article authors are idiots, contradicting their own words. So I guess this is complicated for them 😑

      • underisk@lemmy.ml
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        18 hours ago

        Nothing there is contradictory. People on twitter anecdotally think there are fewer bot replies and try to prove it, erroneously, with charts from cloudflare showing that traffic that self identifies as bot traffic because it’s from fucking search engine spiders is down.

        I can see how this would be confusing if you had no idea what those charts meant and were just looking to confirm an existing bias, though.