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Comment by SXX | Hacker News Reader

I hope at least fellow IT people can recognize that "social media bots" are not running on Yandex datacenters neither they have IP adresses from Russia.

This is just not how social media botting works. If you try to "bot" facebook, instagram or any major social network via browser from datacenter IP let alone ones from Russia you'll soon get all your accounts banned.

Social media are botted via apps on mobile phones set in large farms; read: thousands of mobile devices. They either jailbroken or have some advance automation.

Neither they use Russian IP. Instead they go for residential proxies kindly provided by Israeli firms where bandwidth cost a leg, but it worth it. Or they just use their own botnets instead.

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The residential proxy IPs and the mobile terminals in those farms are just the exit holes.

They don't decide what to post independently. An orchestrating application is hosted somewhere, and that somewhere is Russia.

Why on earth would they host orchestrating applications in Russia? AWS, Hetzner, DigitalOcesn work just fine.

In Russia it's higher latency, way more expensive and there are lots of connectivity issues. Its not like Russia have ministry of social network botting that require to host it within country.

Reason why these bot networks are effective and hard to find is because it's not some "KGB" minister respobsibility.

Botnets, malware, botting in Russia is someone small criminal enterprises with a lot of people doing it independently. They might be affilated to government or not at all - might be they just sell services to highest bidder.

Latency is irrelevant for social media posting, Western providers might identify and suspend such an operation overnight, and no, hosting in Russia is actually a lot cheaper.

> hosting in Russia is actually a lot cheaper.

I'd say you never checked Yandex.Cloud pricing. That's just not true - it's not cheaper.

The business case reason Russia would have a central orchestrator in a Russian data center is that they want centralized control. They are unlikely to delegate control of the information sphere to another, or allow a huge random mass of uncoordinated individuals just “post positive stuff about Russia”.

Putin seems to very much like control, and I doubt he would delegate control over foreign propaganda to agents outside Russia.

This is especially true if you want to spread a lie. Lies have to be coordinate, the truth does not.

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