What's crazy is how complicit platforms themselves are in this behavior.

It's not just Russian political bots, but a good chunk of things you see on social platforms are driven entirely by offshore content farms - China, India, Philippines, etc. Not just the content - but the likes, shares, clicks, etc might all be generated in an attempt to "arbitrage" ad networks.

It's not just that platforms know about this, they are financially dependent on it - which makes it really easy for political agents to hide in the mess.

I hope people are tracking this and we'll get some enlightening reports in a few weeks.

I have so many (two) mixed feelings about this....

1: Yandex is Good for Media freedom. I love Yandex. It's like the only "open" search engine that actively lets you search for pirate content without heavily filtering it.

2: Yandex is/supports the Russian Military. I hate Yandex.

BLM has practically evaporated from social media due to this. Really makes you think.

Surely at least some part of this is confirmation bias?

Yesterday during a live stream I watch (that covers the Russian war against Ukraine), it was very noticeable that the comment section was much quieter. Very few antagonistic posts and about a 50% drop in comments.

I hope Ukraine eliminates Yandex entirely and at the same time cuts Russia off from the Internet. Not even the the 50 cent army is as bad.