r/technology • u/Regular_Eggplant_248 • Jul 21 '25

Social Media YouTube wipes out thousands of propaganda channels linked to China, Russia, others

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/21/youtube-channels-propaganda-china-russia.html
29.1k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

932 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

926

u/Lanhdanan Jul 21 '25

Ideally yeah, but better today than tomorrow

455

u/mortalcoil1 Jul 22 '25

The best time to wipe out thousands of propaganda channels linked to China, Russia, others was 20 years ago.

The second best time is today.

185

u/Nokomis34 Jul 22 '25

I was just talking with my wife how if we managed to remove all the bots from social media things would change almost immediately.

But this is what I've been talking about when I say we've been in the middle of WW3 for years, just the weapon is information (or misinformation if you will) instead of bombs. And so far the war has been pretty one sided. It's time we at least defend ourselves, much less start fighting back.

18

u/ew73 Jul 22 '25

I was just talking with my wife how if we managed to remove all the bots from social media things would change almost immediately.

Do you remember that week or so a while back when the various cybersecurity organizations in the world worked together and took down a huge Russian botnet and knocked several of the bot farms offline entirely?

Social media was awesome. People were generally calmer, nicer and tended to engage, at least, in good faith. And the day the bots came back, everything went back to shit.

Keep in mind, the current guy has gutted many of the federal organizations that specialized in defending against these sorts of attacks.