alt Hacker NewsIs there any serious analysis of this? Presumably it wouldn't be hard to do. Find some right wing telegram channels/x accounts/subreddits, whatever, then chart their activity. All the evidence I've seen are people passing around the cloudflare chart.
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I haven’t seen any, but the people that would have access to that data are probably too busy to care. For example, Political Wire noticed a significant decrease in the right-wing trolls, with one longtime nuisance disappearing completely and the general discussion just being way less divisive. The site is basically run by one guy, and he doesn’t have the time or expertise to do some sort of analysis on this. Also, we aren’t talking about some huge number of people here. It only takes a couple of trolls to ruin an online forum, so if the strikes knocked out only a couple dozen trolls, it could make a noticeable difference in the online discourse while being virtually unnoticeable in the overall data.
Benn Jordan analysed social media bot activity[0] a while back, and if the recent UK right-wing party social media engagement drop[1] after the Ukrainian strike on Yandex data centres is not enough then what is?
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZ5XN_mJE8Y
[1] https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/politics/reform-figures-se...
The APIs you'd use to get this data have pretty much all been taken down in the last few years. That's why you don't really see social media analysis anymore.