Recent Ukrainian drone strikes on Yandex data centers (Yandex is Russia's equivalent of Google) have led to claims that Russian disinformation networks and Kremlin-linked bots were significantly disrupted.
However, the available evidence does not support these claims. The sharp drop in bot traffic shown in widely shared Cloudflare data appears to primarily reflect Yandex's automated search-engine crawlers, similar to Google's crawlers, rather than social media disinformation bots.
Cloudflare data from Russia's major internet providers shows no comparable decline in automated traffic following the strikes. While this doesn't rule out some disruption to disinformation operations, there is currently no clear evidence of a significant impact. Importantly, Cloudflare's data does not directly measure bot activity on platforms such as X or TikTok.
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That chart measures automated requests to websites coming from Yandex's own network. Most of it is Yandex's search engine crawler, which is why 99.6% of that traffic counts as "bot" in the first place. Knock out the data center and the crawler goes quiet. Even u/antibot4navalny, one of the best known trackers of Russian bot networks, says it has "little to do" with propaganda bots on social media.
The Darleks, one of the biggest threats to The Doctor has a toilet plunger for a hand, and what looks like an egg beater on the other. Also, they originally couldn't go up the stairs.
Ukraine has pioneered a few interesting tactics to get the upper hand in this war. Max Fisher did a brilliant video on it, the procurement stuff is about as cool as procurement could get
In completely unrelated news, Elon's latest racist tweet has got ~5k likes instead of his usual ~500k. He's definitely cutting Ukraine off from Starlink for this.
I mean... targeting communication infrastructure is about as basic as it gets though.
That being said, I have yet to see a credible source for those centers being related to a drop in bot activity. From what I was able to find, they were mostly running web crawlers and scrapers.
I would expect all the troll farms to live on US data centres, or more likely US based cloud providers, like AWS or Azure. Why would you let everyone know you are a Russian bot, when you could hide in US infrastructure instead?
Ehh, honestly AWS and the like have plenty enough to run some bots. Astonishingly cheap too. You can get a virtual machine on there powerful enough to let a bot tweet all day for like cents a day.
For a class we got like 15 bucks in credit for AWS VMs, and despite running multiple of them for assignments none of us reached the 15 in a quarter.
Obviously this is anecdotal but I spend a lot of time on twt because that's where my fandoms are, and the difference after the attack was like night and day and is still markedly different right now. Normally the fyp is full of blue check accounts with random AI slop stories, and if you check the comments on political posts or contentious topics etc they're swarming with blue checks or accounts with rage bait etc.
Yesterday and even today, the blue checks are basically gone and the rage baiting is pretty much gone as well. It feels more like an app full of people communicating than anything. Some suspicious 'US' accounts that are posting stuff have a noticeable gap from a certain point on the 10th until sometime today.
I also go on threads and I've noticed fewer longer multi-post threads with obvious AI slop stories, and I've seen so many people on both platforms commenting on how different things feel. Only today have I seen an uptick in anything suspicious, and it's been accounts abruptly pushing a 'you guys are just imagining it, social media bots weren't affected' narrative. So yeah, anecdotal but I really think their command structure at the least was impacted.
It's not cost-effective to decentralize this sort of thing. The average Russian can't afford a DGX Spark or 128GB Mac Studio. Or even a 32GB R9700. That's if they can even buy them in Russia at all.
Which goes for the data centers themselves. I doubt Russia is going to have much luck buying anything Nvidia anytime soon. Even China doesn't have capacity to spare of their domestic products, and those domestic products are way less powerful than Nvidia's current stuff.
About a year ago a reddittor analyzed posts on the conservative sub.
The only day the two most active users in Conservative didn't post was November 1st, which happened to be the day of a power outage in Moscow that was the result of a Ukranian drone attack.
To anyone wondering what Reddit's response to this investigation was, they took away the tool he used to collect the data to make sure people can't do it again in the future.
Years ago, like close to a decade, a mod from there got mad at me in another sub and mass-banned me from a ton of subs specifically conservative ones which is weird cause I didn't visit those, ever.
I ran the old snoopsnoo on his account and I swear he was locked up in an instittion with internet access. Flat out posting for 16 hours a day, always the same 16, never stopping even on the weekends. Universally asleep for the same 8 hours every night. It was uncanny. I remember like 1 day in 6 months he had any posts inside that 8 hour window.
He could not let go of anything would just respond to get the last word relentlessly. It was identical to my family's behavior. Like perfectly identical. Just neurotic need to win even when provably factually wrong.
Close to a decade ago?
Mod to multiple subreddits?
Gotta be a dude, my dude. Occam's razor n stuff.
Russia has prisoners who can't do manual labor, so it would probably be pennies per day to give them internet (not paying salary) and unleash the locked in inmates into the web with a clear goal: stir shit up in the west.
I'd guess 2 people using the same account with 8 hour shifts at the russian troll farm, and 8 hours off to give the illusion it's one person who sleeps.
go over and check on 'new' posts. the gap goes from 13 hrs ago to 21 hrs ago. (I know that arithmetic doesn't work with my previous comment, but I have other screenshots)
I have a folder full of screenshots showing bot comments and hypocritical opinions ranging from 2020 (when I started saving them) to now from those subs.
There's maybe 25-50 real accounts that eat up that fascist propaganda slop, and a merry-go-round of similar sounding bot or paid accounts with similar avatars that pop up every now and then spewing the same MAGA fascist opinions we see online and in our government.
Those same account either go silent or get banned, and a new almost identical account will pop up and start commenting and posting pro MAGA rhetoric.
You would think that the U.S. itself would do more to prevent bot collusion, rather than relying on a war-torn country on the other side of the planet to do it for them. Pretty embarrassing.
The party in power relies on those bots for a lot of the propaganda that supports them. Without that propaganda their supporters might begin to see reality.
I'm worried that it'll only take a week before they've deployed to standard cloud providers. Running in their own data centers simply reduced the costs. Elon and other oligarchs will be more than happy to foot the bill if it means maintaining the propoganda pressure.
Im convinced he did, just not through official channels. The bot activity on Facebook is so bad it's nearly unusable. There is NO WAY he isn't getting a piece of that.
Probably not, although he wouldn't mind that as a side effect.
The real reason behind the push for data centers is personal money and investment. Data center construction is pretty much single handedly sustaining the stock market right now. An enormous portion of the growth over the past 2ish years has been AI stocks and data center production companies (Nvidia obviously, but also ram producers like Sony, large energy companies supplying power to the centers and other related secondary effects).
If data center construction scales back significantly it'll be an enormous financial hit to the US and more importantly (for them) to large investors who've sunk hundreds of billions of dollars into pretty absurd valuations and production schedules driven by the speculation and boom of the last couple years.
It’s what the oligarchs want. There are already subreddits where AI are posting images of hot women and all the comments are the same and they’re all new accounts.
See, ai pictures of a hot “chicks” are just awful. This is why I goon ethically to my wife and the pictures of people’s hot mom/grandma that they post on r/ oldschoolcool
I want to know too. But I mostly doubt this will likely reduce the bot traffic. Like, is there any measurement of this? Like graph or something to see any drop? Perhaps this thread is also propaganda? I don't know anymore. It's just make make head hurt
Is there someone out there who measures this stuff? because I keep seeing this but literally no "evidence" of it. And if someone is measuring it and we know who the bots are, why can't we just block them?
There are people measuring it, and interestingly, they are actually seeing no real difference in bots. So, ironically, this post about disinformation... is in fact, disinformation.
It's literally just claims made by Ukraine. Afaik, the traffic that was measurably affected is webscraping bots for Yandex search, not "disinformation bots."
Basically, this claim itself is disinformation, and it getting spammed everywhere is, not a little ironically, a psy-op.
Haha, one can hope, but of course we can look forward to many exchanges like "russian bot" "I thought all russian bots were destroyed in Yandex bombing?" "did that bother you, bot?" etc, etc
I'm going to go ahead and say that disinformation bot traffic has not been nearly eliminated. It has been dented, but it's still going strong. The narrative that it has been completely dismantled is itself disinformation, meant to make you complacent and let your guard down. You want it to be that easy. Social media bot servers can - and do - run thousands of accounts from a closet. It is not a centralized affair.
I keep hoping NSA will ransomware them and ask them to speak English for a decryption discount.
Then I remember all the property deals Trump has that are heavily backed by Russian donors and resign myself to waiting a few more years for cyber security comedy to really take off.
This is why there's such a a push for data centers in the US, they want to do the same thing, there's power to be wielded in swaying public opinion or forcing a narrative or having it seem like people agree with what you say or being more "correct" than the other party. You could hard grift and scam by making something seem real or plausible. It's a war for the Internet and only the ultra rich are playing.
Bot traffic from the search engine, private hosting provider and big data company goes down. None of the actual telecoms hurt in a meaningful way. None of the critical government infrastructure hurt at all.
Targeting barely protected private businesses and pretending that's a real W is desperate. Claiming that search and novelty AI bots are "those" bots is just pathetic.
Isn't that ironic? I've seen countless posts of misinformation about how this strike has lowered it, with 0 proof to substantiate these claims, so they themselves are just spreading misinformation.
This clearly shows how heavily cyber and information warfare are tied to physical infrastructure in the modern era. Disrupting the source had an immediate and visible impact on the digital landscape
Dear Ukraine. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Obviously in the name of peace I hope minimal casualty - but the damage done by those centres - Brexit, 2016, my mental health - I am so glad to see them slowed, if not eliminated. Is Reality Winner still in jail? She tried to warn us.
Ukrainian strikes on October 8–11 damaged or shut down three major Yandex data centers (Sasovo, Kaluga, and Vladimir). Yandex is Russia’s main search/AI/cloud company (sometimes called “Russia’s Google”). The hits disrupted Yandex’s own services—search, maps, cloud computing, AI tools, taxis, etc.—inside Russia. Yandex confirmed the outages, and Reuters, BBC, and others reported them. 
The viral claim
After the strikes, people on X, Reddit, and elsewhere started saying pro-Trump / MAGA / right-wing bots (and similar activity supporting Germany’s AfD) suddenly vanished from social media. Some pointed to Cloudflare Radar charts showing a huge drop (roughly 94–99%) in automated traffic from Yandex’s network. Zelenskyy and a few European politicians echoed versions of the story.
Why that interpretation is wrong
The Cloudflare data mostly tracks YandexBot, Yandex’s search-engine crawler (the Russian equivalent of Googlebot). When the data centers go down, the crawler stops visiting websites to index them. That is ordinary “bot” traffic for a search engine, not social-media accounts posting political content. 
Researchers and analysts who looked at the data (including investigators familiar with Russian influence operations) have pointed out:
• The chart does not measure activity on X, Facebook, Reddit, or other social platforms.
• Troll farms and social-media bot networks are not primarily run through Yandex’s public search/cloud infrastructure in a way this chart would capture.
• Claims of specific drops in AfD or MAGA bot activity have been based on unsourced or flawed charts.
Subjective impressions that some comment sections feel quieter can come from many other things (time of day, platform algorithms, ordinary variation, confirmation bias). There is no solid public evidence that a large volume of pro-Trump bots suddenly disappeared because of these particular data-center strikes.
Russian online influence activity is real and has been documented for years, but the specific story circulating this week—that Ukraine “turned off the Trump bots” by hitting Yandex—is an overreading of the data that spread quickly among people who wanted it to be true.
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u/Panthera_leo22 3h ago
Hello everyone,
Recent Ukrainian drone strikes on Yandex data centers (Yandex is Russia's equivalent of Google) have led to claims that Russian disinformation networks and Kremlin-linked bots were significantly disrupted.
However, the available evidence does not support these claims. The sharp drop in bot traffic shown in widely shared Cloudflare data appears to primarily reflect Yandex's automated search-engine crawlers, similar to Google's crawlers, rather than social media disinformation bots.
Cloudflare data from Russia's major internet providers shows no comparable decline in automated traffic following the strikes. While this doesn't rule out some disruption to disinformation operations, there is currently no clear evidence of a significant impact. Importantly, Cloudflare's data does not directly measure bot activity on platforms such as X or TikTok.
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Full post from Res Publica: https://www.reddit.com/r/Res_Publica_DE/s/tuMMbUuZ4e