As of the time of this post, some 400 souls have upvoted the post, and therefore uncritically swallowed some bullshit with horrible data methodology.
The claim stems from a small data analysis done by a reddit user, which in theory, shows how a supposed blackout in Moscow is the reason why some purported bot posters in r/conservative stopped all their posting. Sounds good and believable. Until you do the barest minimum looking into it.
As a user points out in the comments of the original Reddit post:
So, there was no blackout in Moscow... There was a blackout in the city of Zhukovsky (100k inhabitants) as per this source, original claim from an Ukrainian news site.
Let's see the hard data presented in a followup post after data collection methodology error correction due to timezones (lmao):
This is it. That's literally all they have to do to convince 400 (and growing) .world users that "30-50% of the content on r/conservative comes from a Russian bot farm". Find a correlation of ONE reported event of a blackout in a fucking tiny city of 100k inhabitants (likely not full blackout in all town) in a country of 150mn inhabitants with the posting in r/conservative. I'm not saying it's not bots in reddit, obviously, but what's the fucking link to everything coming from Russia?
Lemmy is so conspiracy brained against Russia that daring to venture into the big instances is such fucking cognitohazard. For the past year+ I've had a few accounts there trying to counter some of the propaganda, especially when it comes to China and to communism, to try and generate a bit more of a left perspective, but at this point I genuinely feel lost. They're so deep in the propaganda that any conspiracy theory about Russia or China will get to the frontpage.
Them: This proves Russians literally caused conservatism and reaction in America. Before this Russian interference American Republican party members were normal humans who totally didn't have abhorrent, vicious, anti-intellectual, fascist, oppressive views and drives.
Me: At most this shows maybe (maybe but probably not) Russians are trying to do some minor steering of a very heavy ship called American reaction. They didn't build it, they can't turn them into communists via this kind of posting but they can make some money, encourage some position softening towards Russia. Liberals find this abhorrent because they are Nazi Arming Terrorist Organization supporters and find any lessening of support for the militarist expansion of that group or indeed any concern for the concerns of a large civilization with a nuclear stockpile as unacceptable because they are rank, violent, unreasonable, bloodthirsty imperialists thanks to their own exposure to domestic, CIA, State Dept, White House, Atlantic Council propaganda.
Fact is these hypothetical Russians doing most of the posting (let's just grant them this is true for argument's sake) didn't make conservatives hate gay people, they didn't make them want to oppress trans people, they didn't make them racist against black people and supportive of white police brutality against them, they didn't make them support the interests of the bourgeoisie, they didn't make them want to cut social services for poor people, they didn't make them want a Christian supremacist nation predicated on oppression of all non-Christians. They didn't make them support pedophiles and abusers. They didn't make them science deniers. All they are allegedly doing is trying to make some amount of the group of bloodthirsty reactionaries less supportive of imperialism than they were during the neo-con era. One might say there are organic, domestic impetuses for this among the conservative movement as well after all the fallout of the Bush years and the war on terror and the changing economic situation pushing them anyways towards a kind of white supremacist isolationism. This is not even a bad thing and the real question for liberals is why are all of you supporting the militarism and imperialism you opposed during the Bush era when those uncouth neo-cons from Texas were doing it?