Rush Hour 2
Last night, after posting yesterday's entry, I spent some time on Threads - Facebook's version of Twitter which, for the longest time was the online equivalent of New York City with three people living in it. Threads is now populated with a lot more people, but it's still not the bustling metropolis that pre-Musk Twitter used to be.
A post was being widely recirculated that linked to a blog post by an internet expert who was investigating the claims that right wing bots had disappeared off the internet after Ukraine destroyed three Russian data centres. The conclusion was that web crawlers had certainly disappeared, but actual right wing bots were still prevalent.
I found this interesting as the Threads post that linked to this blog was sandwiched between several other posts where people were talking about how the discourse on Threads had suddenly become more civil and a lot of right wing voices had been silenced. 'It's like how Threads used to be when it first started' was the general consensus.
So who's telling the truth? The internet expert who said they looked at traffic logs and stuff, or people who are experiencing a different - less confrontational - social media experience?
Are they both just online constructs? The happy Threads people just Ukraine bots? The internet expert just a Russian mouthpiece basically shouting "I'M NOT CRYING" as his master's bot farm burns?
What is true is that where the UK PM says there was Russian interference in UK politics and elections, right wing skidmark Nigel Farage calls him a liar. Now former Prime Minister and friend of Russia Boris Johnson has gone on record as saying "I asked about Russian interference and my spies said there wasn't any evidence" despite the official report commissioned during his term in office confirming there actually was.
Things are getting interesting.