alt Hacker NewsDoes Cloudflare have much if anything to do with X/Twitter and Facebook/Instagram and TikTok, or even Reddit?
Presumably these bots make up a very small percentage of traffic in comparison to how much they make up in terms of comments.
And I doubt they have visibility on the most popular social networks.
The reason these bots are able to succeed is because the average person comments and votes so little that there's huge volatility between a power user and an average user. Power users are also not that rare, so it's hard to determine who's a power user and who's a bot (though most power users probably are bots).
You can make up a significant portion of comments and votes (especially on a topic) with a VERY small amount of the total viewing traffic.
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Yeah weird thing to purport that feels extremely misleading. Suppose one way to find out is to look at accounts that were suspected of high bot activity and see if they got the same amount of engagement as the weeks before the strikes.
I don't really trust Cloudflare to be a good steward when discussing this since they have a sordid history in protecting hate.
X is under Cloudflare (and according to some of my probes may even use some parts of CF stack)
The biggest tell is that both Russia and the US panicked and immediately tried to prevent further attacks.
This is the first action that has had that effect. Taking out refineries for month after month produced grumbling. Taking out data centres produced an immediate response.
If the data centres didn't matter, Russia and the Trump people would have shrugged and said "Cute..." and/or repeated their standard rhetoric.