Ask HN: Is There Emerging Data on Reduction of Bot Farms After Sanctions?

7 pointstrenning2 comments

Have the sanctions on Russia and the subsequent cutoff from social media sites had an effect on comment counts, disinformation, trolls, etc?

I'm sure there are people working on compiling this information to see if any changes have surfaced.

Does anyone have any information they could share or have seen?

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Just anecdotal but there is a popular leftist subreddit /r/wayofthebern that attracts democratic socialists, conspiracy theorists, and anti-imperialist types that has always been criticized for housing russian bots due to their very generous moderation policies and the fact that many viewpoints against the negative behavior of the west just happens to benefit Russian interests. When the sanctions began, some users noticed that all the posts on the subreddit suddenly lost the typical upvote momentum that they had typically gotten before the sanctions.

Anecdotally from my own experience, there seem to be fewer new (~weeks old) accounts posting inflammatory messages on Reddit.

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