Pavol Vaskovic

Anyway the idea that Russian bots live in Russian server farms and you can simply blow them up is right up there with the tooth fairy and the Easter bunny. The reality is much stupider and darker, and you sound like a child when making such claims. Reality is that if they were ever all so concentrated they would have been stopped already. You don’t have to blow them up; bit-based blocking would have worked just fine. Instead, it’s a distributed problem that is constantly changing and evolving.

A good snapshot of coordinated inauthentic activity from ~2020 in North Macedonia. But it’s likely shifted and morphed by now, as legal prohibitions and other practical barriers catch up. Cambodia and Vietnam have also been dealing with this problem. iwerksandco.com/sellinglies

“On an average working day, the workers are to post on news articles 50 times. Each blogger is to maintain six Facebook accounts publishing at least three posts a day and discussing the news in groups at least twice a day. By the end of the first month, they are expected to have won 500 subscribers and get at least five posts on each item a day. On Twitter, the bloggers are expected to manage 10 accounts with up to 2,000 followers and tweet 50 times a day.” A sketch of what the real people in foreign countries are doing to manage these campaigns. They are not arrayed in vats in Yandex data centers, sorry to disappoint. Look in places like North Macedonia; see Leslie Iwerks’ excellent film SELLING LIES. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia…

I recognize there is all manner of folklore and other quasi-religious beliefs that inform people’s understanding of this topic, and you are welcome to your private reality. But as someone who has been involved in web and internet technology for ~35 years (and who was, in fact, the first developer to use the Twitter API), I can tell you that dealing with coordinated inauthentic activity is a very complex, ongoing problem and arms race. If it had ever been as centralized as people imagine it to be, it would have been solved a long time ago. Also: people undercount idiots. This planet is a vast wasteland, filled with all manner of morons. Not everyone who is illiterate or disagrees with you is a “bot.” A good number of them are simply fans of Ayn Rand, and never developed a frontal cortex. Remember, the “Mute” button exists.

There is a difference between “coordinated inauthentic activity” on social media and “web crawlers.” The former are what people talk about when they are talking about “reply bots” and state-run “disinformation campaigns.” All major platforms have various prohibitions on such campaigns, and coordinated activity (including this garbage platform.) In general, it is difficult and costly to maintain automated social media accounts that bypass detection mechanisms used by platforms to curb such activity. Instead, such campaigns tend to rely on real humans, as they are cheaper, more varied in their response, and won’t get shut down by ToS violations. They also have to use VPNs or similar IP masquerading in order to avoid country-level blockages. Many platforms like X are not available in Russia, either, adding another technical hurdle for freelance actors. So other countries with low labor costs (India, Philippines, Indonesia, for example) may be employed instead. There is often no practical way to identify this traffic as inauthentic, until perhaps a major campaign pattern emerges, at which point it risks being shut down. Web crawlers, by contrast, are permitted activity and are used by major internet search providers such as Google and Yandex to “spider” the web and identify new web links and changes to sites. So that content providers know what this traffic is, they label themselves as “bots.” This is valid traffic. When you see a graph showing a sharp decline in “bot” traffic, it is indicating a change in this valid web crawling traffic. There is no one keeping graphs of “coordinated inauthentic activity” social media traffic; indeed if it was identifiable and graphable like this, it would already be shut down. So, blowing up data centers in Russia could conceivably hamper coordinated social media campaigns, if for some reason they had a dependency on services hosted there. But given the constraints on such campaigns, they are likely to be run from elsewhere. What has been disrupted, probably, is Yandex web crawler traffic. If one wishes, for optics, to honor the unilateral imposition of a “energy ceasefire,” blowing up datacenters is a good tactic and should be maximized. Blow them all up. But don’t pretend this has any meaningful impact on coordinated inauthentic social media activity. It does not, and is a different problem entirely. Pretending otherwise feeds magical thinking, incorrect ideas about how technology works, and reduces pressure on the adversary by claiming imaginary gains. Keep pressure up, and report gains clearly and correctly. If you want to go after social media campaigns, track them down, monitor their activity, and source their origins. Same as it ever was. Taking out datacenters is a nearly completely unrelated concern.