Ukraine takes down massive bot farm, seizes 150,000 SIM cards

I always wonder if Russia would collapse, if suddenly a lot of the disinfo & hate on various online media would become noticeably quieter.

That partially already happened at the start of the war. There was a massive "brain drain" among the higher educated part of society, which did include a bunch of hackers. Why live inside russia these days when you can move elsewhere and get paid better?
As I recall there was a period a couple years back where Russia was cut off from the greater internet and a lot of interesting things got quieter, including r/conservative on Reddit.
there's also iran, I wouldn't be surprised if north korea and china also have bot farms, and then even in america evangelical christians fund shady hate operations around the world too
- its well known china has an enormous online presence set around spreading misinformation, and of course the worlds best 'whataboutisms' you are ever likely to see
Probably. They've managed use throughput using bots, but if the government collapsed the bit farms would stop receiving funding, and the entire project would either wither away or be wiped away by a new state trying to replace the instruments of the old.
We actually did see this at the start of the war. When Russia was dealing with the new sanction and shifting focus from the west to Ukraine.
They seem to think it's important based on how much they invest into it
I think it would absolutely make a difference.
Oh man, where would Lemmy be without all the communist ~~propaganda~~ memes?
- communist propaganda
  It's like you know that these are words, and they're words that you've seen people put together in the past, but you have no idea what they mean.
  Where is anyone talking about communism? Where is the propaganda? What the fuck are you even talking about??
- What does communism have to do with Russia?

Russia has the last laugh since they confiscated 3 copies of The Sims 3.

Lemmygrad just lost half of its users.
I still can’t believe that happened
- Context? Lol
Ukraine will never recover from that crushing blow. Without The Sims 3, those 3 soldiers will surely turn against Zelensky.
That was beautiful.

Daily comment to say fuck Russia

- If you had left out "gorgeous Russian girls" you would probably have significantly fewer downvotes. I generally agree it's not the people's fault their nation is a dictatorship, but I think generally when people say fuck Russia they mean fuck the Russian state, not the geographical area nor the people that happened to be born there.
- especially: gorgeous Russian girls
  Bruh
- I agree that there's nothing wrong with being any ethnicity (although that's a creepy way to say it), however the Russian public does have extremely high support for Putin's actions: https://www.statista.com/statistics/896181/putin-approval-rating-russia/
  Notice the huge jump in approval when he invaded Ukraine. Only FDR, Truman, Kennedy, and the Bushes have ever gotten that high of approval in the US.
- Is it sarcasm?
- It kinda is.

Musk just lost 150K sycophants.

Same for Zuck

Hopefully the conservative channels get quite a bit.

How does this have negative three comments??

Looks like a bug! For me, from lemmy.world's web interface, it is -1 as of this posting.
As the saying goes, there are two fundamentally difficult things about programming:
cache coherence
coming up with good names for things
off-by-one errors
Negative comment counts are likely caused by the latter.
It's something glitchy that happens when people delete comments. I know Voyager recently pushed a fix, I'm not sure about Liftoff (If I'm recognizing the UI in your screenshot correctly).
If a user deletes a comment it subtracts from the count, seems to go to negative numbers sometimes, maybe when it's removed it subtracts two on certain circumstances

why are these are being set up in Ukraine and not Russia? What do they gain from having them within reach of the Ukrainian police?

My guess is that it'd make it look like it were actual ukrainians spreading the disinfo, as the IP wouldn't show russian addresses. Could also be that Ukraine is blocking internet traffic from Russia, so being there is a way to bypass the block.
I fully expect the assholes behind said farms to be safely within russian territory, so they're just sighing and shrugging as having to set up a new base.
- Still, being physically there is weird. Aren't there reliable ways to fake it?
it's so these accounts can believably pose as ukrainian
- Couldn't they set up a VPN / Proxy in Ukraine and have the actual bot farm run from within Russia.
Better infrastructure and access to tech would be my guess
Sim farms can be found in most countries. Granted this is a big one.
Russia would be a less than ideal choice for criminals right now due to the sanctions affecting routes and prices between Russia and Europe.

be interesting to see how much the usership of lemmygrad drops lol

(and the rest of lemmy)

Nah, lemmy is too small of a circlejerk to really be a target for these people. I don't think instances require working phone numbers for account creation anyway.
- bruh, if its small the troll farms have no problem outmassing real ppl
- Have you seen Hexbear? It's all just Russian/Chinese propaganda. If the trolls aren't posting there, the users are getting their information from the trolls and then reposting it.

What do they do with these SIM cards?
- From what I gather here in the comments, they use the sim cards to make the bots look like they're actually posting from where the farm is located, since using a VPN would not be sufficient to hide their tracks.

I'd be interested in seeing exactly what messages this farm was putting out. Lists of accounts and what networks they primarily operated on would also be very interesting.

I saw on yahoo about pringles being in Belarus a comment about how Pringles was killing “Nazzis” in Ukraine. Makes we wonder if that shit was from Russia

Everyone is well aware of the Azov brigade. They are at most, 2200 soldiers, and do not represent Ukraine on the whole.
- and do not represent Ukraine on the whole.
  74% of Ukrainians view the leader of the WW2 Ukrainian fascists (the OUN) Stepan Bandera favourably. And 81% view the OUN positively.
  • The support for the recognition of the OUN-UPA as the participants of the struggle for the national independence of Ukraine has significantly increased: 81% support it, and only 10% are against. This support has increased 4 times since 2010, and doubled since 2015.
  • Bohdan Khmelnytsky and Mykhailo Hrushevsky are Ukrainian historical figures who are unequivocally positively perceived by Ukrainian society (by more than 90% of the respondents). Over the recent years, there has been a positive trend in the attitude towards Ukrainian historical figures, around which heated debates were going on in Ukrainian society decades ago. In particular, the attitudes that gradually improved are the ones towards Ivan Mazepa (44% in 2012 and 76% in 2022), Simon Petliura (26% in 2012 and 49% in 2022) and Stepan Bandera (22% in 2012 and 74% in 2022). It is important that the positive attitude towards the ideologue of Ukrainian nationalism prevails today in the south-eastern regions of Ukraine, and among those who speak only Russian in everyday life.
  Source: One of the largest Ukrainian polling institutes
  The OUN carried out pogroms, mass executions of jews and were regarded by even the nazi SS as disgustingly brutal.
  https://www.dw.com/en/stepan-bandera-ukrainian-hero-or-nazi-collaborator/a-61842720
- There are many pictures of non-Azov combatants with Nazi symbols.
  But at least you acknowledge Azov are nazis, that's a step up from the rest.
- They are at most, 2200 soldiers
  It's weird how they're on every front of ukraine, in front of the cameras everywhere, and also in western ukraine simultaneously. Amazing how so few people can be everywhere at once and always in front of the cameras instead of literally anyone that isn't a nazi.

Who did they invade?

The following countries were invaded by Nazis:

        Austria
    Belgium
    Czechoslovakia (modern Czech Republic and Slovakia)
    Denmark
    Estonia
    France
    Greece
    Guernsey (U.K. Channel Island)
    Hungary
    Italy
    Jersey (U.K. Channel Island)
    Latvia
    Lithuania
    Luxembourg
    Monaco
    Netherlands
    Norway
    Poland
    Russia (partial occupation)
    San Marino
    Ukraine
    Yugoslavia (modern Albania, Croatia, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Serbia)

- Give me 1 article showing Zelensky was making progress on a nazi purge before the war.
Azov is clearing their dark past. It's not fully Nazi anymore. Ukraine needs to clear remaining Nazi symbols within the government to improve the international image. The real enemy of Russians is the Kremlin, not Ukraine.