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

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.

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.

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

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?

Lemmygrad just lost half of its users.

I still can’t believe that happened

Ukraine will never recover from that crushing blow. Without The Sims 3, those 3 soldiers will surely turn against Zelensky.

That was beautiful.

Same for Zuck

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:

1. cache coherence
2. coming up with good names for things
3. 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

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.

it's so these accounts can believably pose as ukrainian

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.

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.