00:00Does your feed suddenly feel less toxic lately?
00:02Some users think Russian trolls went quiet after Ukraine bombed Russia's Yandex data centers.
00:07And yes, automated traffic from Yandex fell, but that doesn't mean propaganda accounts disappeared.
00:13A bot is not the same as a propaganda account.
00:15A bot can simply be a web crawler scanning websites for search results.
00:19Researchers say those crawlers breaking down largely explains the drop in activity.
00:24Meanwhile, influence campaigns are still trying to shape what you see and believe.
00:27Here's two ways it's done.
00:28One, using fake profiles which argue with real users and boost one another's posts.
00:33That manufactured engagement makes their messages more visible.
00:36With today's AI tools, a small team can manage hundreds of online personas.
00:41Two, operators also flood the internet with misleading articles,
00:44hoping search engines and AI tools will treat them as reliable sources.
00:48Do you think your opinions are yours, truly?
