Apparently engagement on that other site’s r/conservative dropped by 2/3 when Russian data centers went down due to drone strikes.

  • saarth@lemmy.world
    296·
    6 days ago

    You know what, I have been working in Social listening (analysis of social media) for the last 8 or so years and since morning I have been seeing this claim about Russian data centers and activity on r/Conservative, and it has been smelling of propaganda and annoying me all day.

    It’s almost 1 am in the morning and I just realised I have the tools to prove or disprove this. So I got up and in 5 minutes I was able get the data.

    Americans are really getting real good at propaganda for sure.

    • MrVilliam@sh.itjust.works
      271·
      6 days ago

      I’ll be the idiot who admits to being an idiot. What does this graph mean? Is that just raw mentions of “r/conservative” across the internet as grouped by day? Is it meaningful to see spikes alternating with dips? If what the meme is saying were true, what would this graph look like and why? I’m far from an expert in this and I’m curious.

      • Baguette@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        121·
        6 days ago

        I don’t really see how mentions of the subreddit is meaningful of how many bots there were. There are so many posts about r/conservative being down from other subreddits that I can’t see the correlation

        • MrVilliam@sh.itjust.works
          3·
          6 days ago

          Same, which is why I’m assuming that I’m misinterpreting what I’m looking at. My interpretation doesn’t make any sense, but for somebody who’s never looked at whatever that is, that’s what it looks like it’s saying? It’s probably obvious to people who look at that shit every day, but I’m not sure if the “mentions” are correlating to what’s in the search bar looking thing or what. Or maybe “mentions” is jargon with a different meaning? Idk.

      • saarth@lemmy.world
        5·
        6 days ago

        It’s not mentions of r/conservative, it’s mentions (posts and comments) in the subreddit.

    • Wildmimic@anarchist.nexusEnglish
      9·
      6 days ago

      There seems to be a big difference on Twitter tho: https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/politics/reform-figures-see-social-media-engagement-drop-after-strikes-on-russia-data-centres-410517/

      Account of Reform’s Richard Tice, which has 400k followers and who normally has 100k+views on their posts and thousands of likes and comments now struggles to reach above 35k views and even 100 comments and retweets.

      Nigel Farage himself with his 2.3m followers has also lost a lot of “engagement”, with his content normally reaching hundreds of thousands of views, and now he’s struggling to hit 100k and gets only a fraction of the normal amount of comments and likes.

      Edit: I hypothesize that reddit bots are less hosted on Yandex and more on other (western) infrastructure, while Twitter bots seem to come mainly from Yandex.

      • saarth@lemmy.world
        8·
        6 days ago

        There could be multiple reasons for this.

        1. The bots are used only for generating engagement and not posting. So engagements went down, posts didn’t.
        2. The bots are used on Twitter and not on Reddit so twitter was impacted but reddit wasn’t. Kinda likely considering twitter loves bots and reddit has been cracking down on them.
        3. Engagement is not a very transparent metric, and depends on a lot of factors like when content is posted, the quality of the content, seasknality, etc. There can be multiple things affecting engagement.
        • Wildmimic@anarchist.nexusEnglish
          1·
          6 days ago

          I also heard that on Threads there is now a strange silence around anything “culture wars”-related btw, while Facebook doesn’t seem to be fazed at all. So the Yandex infrastructure seems to have been the staging area for specific platforms, while others are being manipulated from other sites.

          • saarth@lemmy.world
            1·
            6 days ago

            I have yet to see credible evidence that any kind of social media activity went down in the last 2-3 days. To me this seems like journalists and politicians capitalising on what people want to hear.

            • Wildmimic@anarchist.nexusEnglish
              1·
              6 days ago

              The Twitter numbers seem pretty solid for me - most engagement numbers are achieved in the first 24 hours of posting content on twitter (there are outliers, but it’s a valid assumption). The next weeks will tell how much this perceived drop is really from Yandex going down.

      • saarth@lemmy.world
        3·
        6 days ago

        Because it’s a quick search and not a dedicated query, I guess the historical data collection is stopping at 56 days instead of going all the way to 60. Same thing happens when I look at any other sub.

  • Uriel238 [all pronouns]@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    21·
    6 days ago

    There’s a conspicuous number of comments on this post eager to affirm correlation is not causation.

    At first I thought the meme was referring to all the people I severed ties with, because to them, torture, genocide and college rape are controversial and require nuance.

      • Jiral@lemmy.world
        81·
        7 days ago

        That is a strawman of course, what is not a strawman is that a lot of the online discourse just mirrors Russian propaganda lines, especially once you go to AfD or FPÖ forums. It is almost 1to1 the RT narrative. Maybe just by accident and not related to evidence of Russia sponsoring and running right populist anti EU media platforms in Europe.

      • Jiral@lemmy.world
        6·
        7 days ago

        I don’t like the Russian, I also don’t like disinfo and therefore I have to agree with you. Jokes are fine but some of the stuff that is being posted is written as if it were true. Russian disnformation is real but it does not necessarily rely on domestic Yandex server. I have not seen any evidence yet for impact on foreign psyops operations. The only credible information I have seen was on the reduction in Yandex search bots, which is the obvious reaction to the loss of server capacity.

  • THE_GR8_MIKE@lemmy.worldEnglish
    15·
    6 days ago

    That must be why they’re all targeting the Gears E Day servers. You know, because the game where you chainsaw people in half is woke now. Imagine if grindr went down. They’d be out of all friends.

    • sompreno@lemmy.zipEnglish
      11·
      6 days ago

      Having pride flags in a game is woke I’m not sure why the level of violence in game would change that. Whether or not that’s a bad thing is another discussion.

      • THE_GR8_MIKE@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        6 days ago

        And anyone who even gives a single fuck about that isn’t worth listening to. Nor is their opinion on anything worth any weight. They can go back to COD if it bothers them that much. Calling everyone else snowflakes while they do it lmao

  • rmuk@feddit.ukEnglish
    5·
    6 days ago

    I bet those guys on the left are pissed off. They all agreed they were all going to wear the little black hat but then fucking Chad turned up with his big white hat like a dick.

  • PattyMcB@lemmy.world
    102·
    6 days ago

    From some of these comments, it looks like 2/3 of this community has lost its sense of humor.

    (This is also a joke. Bring on the downvotes!)