Did Ukraine Really Just Take Out An Entire Russian Disinformation Hub?

Probably not, but it seems to have upset the Putin-humpers!

Boop boop, beep beep. Photo by İsmail Enes Ayhan on Unsplash

Ukraine really fucked off Russia over the weekend — right in the middle of President Deals’s new deal with Russia! — by making a third direct hit on a Yandex data center, which is Russia’s equivalent of the Googling machine.

And then some people started saying that they weren’t getting hassled by Nazi accounts any more:

“If confirmed” is doing a lot of work, but that does seem to be a noticeable drop in traffic!

There are some people speculating right now Ukraine’s efforts might be a new type of October Surprise for Americans, the sort of incident that gets manufactured or emerges right before a big November election, usually aided by credulous dipshits in the media, plus the ratfuckers that are currently crawling all over our busted political system. What they are saying is that there is a marked decline in disinformation campaigns, because there are currently no Russian bots to push them, like so many dungbeetles rolling their balls around.

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There are quite a lot of skeptics, however. Cybernews is among them:

Some personalities online claim this means that Russian disinformation campaigns, so prevalent on social media, will now be paralyzed – and that this might be important before the mid-term elections in the U.S.A.

A few individuals say they themselves see a lot fewer posts from suspicious accounts on X, Facebook, and other social networks. […]

Ukrainian drones shredding Russian bot networks and helping Western democracies along the way would be a wild story indeed. But it’s just not true – people are naively (or deliberately) confusing bots with “bots,” a word used to describe state-sponsored social media accounts.

In other words, web crawlers are the bulk of what’s been taken offline, not the bad actor or AI-run accounts that are absolutely everywhere causing mayhem and havoc in our chats. (As in, not the troll farms we all got so familiar with during Trump 1.0.)

Let’s embiggen that one on the left, the man who understands stuff:

Now, even if this is the case, which it looks like it might be, Ukraine’s attacks do still have a marked, downstream effect on Russian botnets! If this has been interfering with payments to taxi services and grocery stores, then the people who work for them can’t get to their office or buy lunch, and that makes people hangry, and when people get hangry they quit their jobs. Even when it’s a labor of love, like making the entire world more racist by posting as MAGA grandfathers on the internet, every day.

But it isn’t the be-all end-all, and I don’t think that Ukraine took out something that is going to make the difference in the American midterm elections. It is, however, surprising, and unprecedented, and damaging as hell, and it’s happening in October, so I think those of us in the United States can make it all about ourselves. Why not?

The reason I say this is yes, Russia has been very good at using bots and botnets to skew important and very delicate conversations online, and it has created a major cultural differences in how Americans regard one another.

But something else has done that as much or more than Putin’s Russia: Americans.

Do you think the United States isn’t pushing its own disinformation campaigns? For fuck’s sake, we’re soaking in them! Literally, over the weekend, on both coasts!

These pieces of shit in power lie and tell us that global warming isn’t real, or that it’s a “natural process,” and then they tell us it’s all our fault anyway, and then it’s used as a pretext to squeeze and squeeze and squeeze us for more mortgage or rent money, to pay more for water and other utilities during an era when not using air conditioning is now a matter of life or death for many. Don’t get me started on the racist pieces of shit who used those exact campaigns to leverage their way into power a second time, when we had thought we might be free of these assholes, but nope!

It’s very easy for us to outsource our problems and our pain. It remains part of our national culture, and it has been this way for a long time. Old habits are hard to break, after all.

But the truth is, if there were no problems already there to exploit, every country in the world could throw everything they had at us, and they would be useless. It’s sort of like how certain types of people will exploit any emotional weaknesses they see for their own gain, except that it is entire nations that have figured out how to weaponize emotions and deploy that weaponization, straight to your eyeballs on the socials! The whole world is at it!

There is much to be written about how we actually break the hold of these botnets, bad actors, disinformation campaigners, fascist-humpers, racist scumbags, misogynists, and all the rest of these fools we are forced to endure, but right now we are just a day over three weeks from the midterms.

So whatever happened, and whatever the result is, if you do find that your online world is nicer and quieter right now than it’s been, whatever the reason, make the most of it, do your part to help getting good information out there, study up on your ballots — have you checked into whatever confusing, strangely-worded MAGA amendments might be on your ballot where you live? — and get out and vote.

Remember, nothing upsets the authoritarian scum like exercising democracy, so let’s go do it while we still can.

OPEN THREAD!