Disclaimer: This article is based on actual news from the real world – honestly! However, it has been sprinkled with a healthy dose of satire.
KYIV — Over four days last week, Ukrainian drones hit three data centers belonging to Yandex, Russia’s Google clone. Yandex is apparently not, to the surprise of many, an online retailer of sexy Halloween costumes.
Yandex announced that operations at its Sasovo facility had been “completely suspended,” that the Vladimir site had shut down, and that some equipment in Kaluga was now “unusable,” which is tech-industry jargon for “on fire.” Yandex brilliantly unlisted the physical addresses of all four of its cloud data centers off of Yandex Maps after the first strike, something they probably wish they’d thought of earlier.
Nothing evil to see here… (Skorzewiak/depositphotos)
Cloudflare data showed automated traffic from Yandex’s network was down 99.7% compared to last week. Volodymyr Zelenskyy told the Warsaw Security Forum that it “suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social media platforms,” with “less hate, less division and fewer provocations because there were fewer bots.”
Historian Timothy Snyder posted that a lot of pro-Trump and pro-AfD bot work seems to depend on Russian data centers for some reason, but there’s no possible way of knowing why that’s the case (this is sarcasm).
Polymarket announced that activity on major US political subreddits plunged, but offered no evidence of this, which is still more than Polymarket usually offers.
Meanwhile, a Czech member of the European Parliament circulated a graphic indicating that there was a drop in AfD posts, but it turned out to be AI-generated, meaning his evidence that bots were gone was fabricated by a bot. Perhaps this is exactly what the bots want us to think.
Disinformation researcher Caroline Orr Bueno asked people to “reject disinformation even when it’s telling a story that you want to hear,” which is both good advice and never going to happen.
The buried lede here is that social media platforms already know which accounts are bots.
Social media companies can find plenty of these accounts. Bots post ragebait, ragebait gets engagement, engagement generates ad impressions. Russian bots are in your feed because social media algorithms amplify them for money. In 2021, Facebook’s Nick Clegg wrote a defense of this behavior titled “You and the Algorithm: It Takes Two to Tango.” That’s technically true, the same way “I didn’t mean to kill the baby, he just wanted to ride on the roof of the car” is technically true.
How do we know?
In 2018, Facebook’s own researchers wrote a report that included a slide that said “Our algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness,” and warned that if left unchecked, Facebook’s content recommendation algorithm would feed people “more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention & increase time on the platform.” According to the Wall Street Journal, Mark Zuckerberg and other senior executives largely shelved the research. Meanwhile, Facebook’s ranking formula counted an angry-face reaction as worth five likes, so take a wild guess at what they’re optimizing for here exactly. Meta claims they no longer rank angry-faces at 5x, but given everything else they’ve been caught doing, it’s hard to take the claim at face value.
In October 2019, Facebook data scientist Jeff Allen reported that posts from known troll farms in Kosovo and Macedonia were reaching 140 million Americans every month and that roughly 75% of them did not follow those accounts. The largest Christian American page on Facebook was actually a troll farm reaching 75 million Americans a month. The largest Black American page was also a troll farm. Allen wrote that “it is our platform that is choosing to give” them that reach, and added, “This is not normal. This is not healthy.” When MIT Technology Review published his report two years later, five of the pages in question were still up.
According to internal documents obtained by Reuters, Meta projected that about 10% of its 2024 revenue, roughly $16 billion, might come from ads for scams and banned items. Meta only bans an advertiser when they are 95% sure the advertiser is committing fraud. However, as they close in on that 95% benchmark, Meta charges those advertisers higher ad rates. Meta claims this is to discourage bad advertisers, but it sounds a lot more like Meta is just price-gouging a co-dependent business relationship. It also means Meta can spot the fraud, charge a premium for it, and then serve it to you to piss you off and destroy America in the process.
I cannot stress this strongly enough – we know they do this. If you have ever boycotted anything in your life and you are still on Meta, you are a goddamn hypocrite.
US midterms are November 3. Yandex expects repairs to take at least six months. The bots will be back eventually, and the platforms will be thrilled to see them.
