In brief
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that recent strikes on Russian data centres had reduced online hate and division, a claim that spread across social media. BBC Verify checked the data from Cloudflare and found those figures reflected routine bot traffic on Yandex’s network, not disinformation bots. Experts from the US‑based dTeam and Yandex officials point out that bot activity has remained unchanged, and the strikes mainly disrupted search engine services. While the attacks have taken down infrastructure, there is no proof that Russian influence operations on social media are down.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Monday that attacks on Russian data centres had reduced online hate, a claim that rapidly spread across social media. The statement was interpreted by many as evidence that Kremlin‑linked bot networks operating from the Russian internet giant Yandex had been crippled.
Yandex, often dubbed Russia’s Google, has been hit three times since 8 October. In addition to loss of infrastructure, the company reported it was struggling to keep services running. The second strike on Thursday caused a sharp decline in automation traffic seen by Cloudflare, a network‑monitoring firm, which then spawned a flurry of online posts claiming the bot traffic had fallen dramatically.
Cloudflare clarified that its data captures all automated requests to websites on its network, including bots that crawl sites for search‑engine indexing. “The drop off was not necessarily bot behaviour on social media platforms,” the company said. The figures therefore do not prove that disinformation bots are down.
Experts from dTeam, a U.S. group tracking Moscow‑linked influence operations, said there has been no change in traffic from known Russian accounts or bot clusters on any platform. “If the offices of the known groups were in flames we would see a change,” they added. Their analysis shows bots tied to campaigns such as Storm‑1516 and Matryoshka were still active on Tuesday.
Zelensky’s office clarified that the president was speaking about the overall atmosphere on social media, noting “fewer provocative and hateful comments” reported by users, rather than a technical drop in bot activity.
Yandex has said that using its cloud services for large‑scale manipulation on social media is against its rules and that violators are blocked. Independent analyst Mikhail Klimarev explained that Yandex uses bots to crawl the internet for search‑engine indexing, so the strike likely caused the service to turn these off. “The company can’t keep services running with its computing resources so severely degraded,” he said.
While the attacks have disrupted internet services for many, there is no evidence proving that Russian influence operations on social media are down. The cyber‑war continues, but the bot traffic that spreads disinformation appears to be resilient to these targeted strikes.
Image: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky speaking during a press conference. Source: BBC.
