this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2026
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cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/11858823

...

Over the weekend, Ukraine carried out a co-ordinated drone strike against several major Russian data centres. This completely decimated Russia's Yandex, ... which controls more than 70% of search traffic in the country, and has reportedly resulted in a dramatic fall in bot traffic from the Yandex network.

As per the bot analysts at Tom’s Hardware, bot traffic from the Yandex network has dropped to just 0.4% of the maximum number of HTTP requests recorded in the past two weeks. That means activity from automated, Russian-hosted accounts has been virtually eliminated on social media.

...

As a result, the social media engagement on posts from [far-right] Reform UK figures appears to have dropped in the wake of Ukrainian strikes on Russian data centres.

...

There has already been a strong and significant impact on bot traffic in countries such as France and Germany.

David Colon, a French information operations researcher, has noted a huge difference in the performance of narratives generated by the Russia-linked information operations group, Storm-1516.

The silencing of the bots also appears to have caused a dramatic drop in activity around Germany's far-right AfD..

...

Amongst others, the article is citing Britain's Reform politician Richard Tice. Three posts on X from the Reform deputy leader to his almost 400,000 followers on Monday, 11 October [hadn't] hit triple figures for reposts or comments, with one not even reaching 10,000 views ... Before the Ukrainian strikes on the Russia data centres, Tice’s posts got considerably more engagement, consistently hitting triple figures for comments and reposts, whilst racking up hundreds of thousands of views.

...

A similar pattern can be seen when it comes to other far-right figures such as Nigel Farage [the linked article is given evidence about that].

...

As Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky himself said after the strikes on Russian data centres, it’s suddenly become a β€œlittle easier to breathe” on social media.

...

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[–] SrMono@feddit.org 137 points 1 week ago (4 children)

So. Just so the internet gets usable again, we need a gofundme-campaign for ongoing long range strikes on data centers.

[–] drcobaltjedi@programming.dev 48 points 1 week ago

we need a gofundme-campaign for ongoing long range strikes on data centers.

Ask and you shall receive the official Ukrainian defensive war donation site

[–] Photonic@lemmy.world 20 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, there are still a lot of fucked up actual people around

[–] SrMono@feddit.org 43 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Yea. But my ethics dictate not to use cruise missiles or drones on them, so I prefer hardware losses πŸ€·β€β™‚οΈ

[–] Photonic@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Same here, but I just don’t think this was enough to make the internet as a whole usable again.

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[–] Honytawk@discuss.tchncs.de 13 points 1 week ago (5 children)

But they won't get a feedback loop from bots that make them more visible and more fucked up.

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[–] GenosseFlosse@feddit.org 5 points 1 week ago

It would be trivial to just set up the operation on AWS or Microsoft servers in the US. I guess the reason the have not done it is that the US would have full insight in the software, users and social media accounts they're using, which might be an issue if the government changes.

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[–] Redditquaza@feddit.org 129 points 1 week ago (12 children)

Not only in Europe, when you look at the tweets of the White House from today, you basically don't see any MAGA replies under them and almost exclusively criticism which is genuinely insane compared to the situation a week ago.

[–] HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org 19 points 1 week ago

Fantastic timing for the US midterms, and a great move!

Maybe that was what the disagreement between Zelensky and the Orange-in-Chief was really about? How was again the slogan, "Data is the new Oil", wasn't it?

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[–] CharlesDarwin1809@piefed.world 72 points 1 week ago (18 children)

But tankies told me that Russia is a peaceful democratic country, and that Russia has no will whatsoever to act aggressively towards its neighbours, even on the internet.

In fact, tankies told me that westerners are the only people in the world who are ever aggressive, malicious, or evil.

[–] Ismay@programming.dev 11 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Don't know who you talked to. You can believe in communism AND say that Russia is a hostile pos of a state and that Putin is a war criminal and should be judge as so.

[–] greenbit@lemmy.zip 51 points 1 week ago (2 children)

They said tankies, not communists

[–] kolmaskommentoija@sopuli.xyz 23 points 1 week ago

Yeah. Simping for authoritarian regimes, while larping leftists, has absolutely nothing to do with communism.

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[–] bufalo1973@piefed.social 21 points 1 week ago

What does Putin have to do with communism? Except hating it.

[–] GreyEyedGhost@piefed.ca 7 points 1 week ago

Don't know who you talked to. You can believe in communism AND say that Russia is a hostile pos of a state and that Putin is a war criminal and should be judge as so.

Yes, but not on any community on lemmy.ml...

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[–] mildseason@sopuli.xyz 61 points 1 week ago (3 children)

The BBC has debunked the claims in this article.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9y7l0pm8jkko

Misinformation can come from anywhere.

[–] cinoreus@lemmy.world 14 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Exactly. Hate to say it, but most of the political bot farms are likely not in Russia, but in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh etc. it's cheap to hire people there, and X has once already debunked that plenty of far right traffic comes from India.

[–] bigFab@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago

Misinformation works on 95% of audience who hear what they like to hear. Sources are optional.

[–] cypherpunks@lemmy.ml 33 points 1 week ago (25 children)

From the article:

As per the bot analysts at Tom’s Hardware, bot traffic from the Yandex network has dropped to just 0.4% of the maximum number of HTTP requests recorded in the past two weeks. That means activity from automated, Russian-hosted accounts has been virtually eliminated on social media.

That... is not what that means. The HTTP requests graphed by Cloudflare shown in the Tom's Hardware article are the yandex web crawler. This is traffic from YandexBot, which is their search engine's equivalent to GoogleBot. That drop in traffic doesn't indicate anything whatsoever about russian-hosted accounts on social media, it's about a search engine's bots reading web pages. 🀦

Note that the TomsHardware article graph comes from here: https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots/as13238 - this is one of Yandex's AS numbers. In case you doubt that the traffic cloudlfare calls "bot traffic" there is really just the YandexBot, and you really want to believe that maybe Cloudflare is classifying social-media-posting HTTP requests as "bots" in that graph, you can check their graph for YandexBot specifically here https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots/directory/yandex and you'll see:

second panel of The Office "it's the same picture" meme

Besides grossly mischaracterizing what the Tom's Hardware article says by implying that the YandexBot web crawler has something to do with the kind of bots they're talking about, this The London Economic article also cites some slightly more plausible sounding evidence for reduced social media activity:

Take Richard Tice for example. Below are three posts on X from the Reform deputy leader to his almost 400,000 followers on Monday, 11 October. At the time of writing, none of the posts had hit triple figures for reposts or comments, with one not even reaching 10,000 views.

Could British fascists be getting retweets from bot farms in a yandex datacenter? Sure, they're a cloud provider, they're no doubt hosting some stuff like that.

But, does this example actually demonstrate it? No. The first yandex datacenter strike was on October 8; here is a tweet from @TiceRichard from October 6 with only 10 replies and 6 retweets: screenshot of the tweet linked and described

If there has actually been a measurable drop in "inauthentic" social media posts (or other retweets or likes or whatever) as a result of the yandex datacenter strikes, I still haven't seen evidence of it.

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[–] MehBlah@lemmy.world 23 points 1 week ago (1 children)

But But all the tankies are saying it was just web crawler bots. Surely finely honed suckers who shill for putin for free wouldn't lie.

/s

[–] Leviathan@lemmy.world 10 points 1 week ago (3 children)
[–] A_A@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

i've been searching that but cannot find a reliable source. Those fails you can read in my comments.

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[–] Rentlar@lemmy.ca 21 points 1 week ago

I wonder if that will make any difference in Brazil's runoff round of elections..., hopefully they can stay offline until the 25th, (or even Nov 3 would be nice)?

[–] derAbsender@piefed.social 13 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

I bet the new Russian Bots are hosted in the US

[–] prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 14 points 1 week ago

What do you think the data center under the east wing is going to be for?

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[–] BigBoyShuanzee@aussie.zone 13 points 1 week ago

I can't wait to see how different the internet is when Israeli data centres get hit.

[–] betanumerus@lemmy.ca 9 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

A master stroke by those who oppose concentration of power in a minority of wannabe fascists and dictators. This exposes how the wannabe fascists and dictators are trying to use fossil fuel revenue to simulate and impersonate a large population of electors, with artificial bots (or is it "super bots" now? 🀣)

[–] DavorS@piefed.social 9 points 1 week ago (2 children)

let's now bomb the indian, chinese, american, israeli or any other bot farms and data centers and live in an utopia.

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[–] TeaWithDani@lemmy.world 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I'm a little less concerned about the Russian bots than all the American platforms that have been allowing and tolerating this for decades now.

You motherfuckers rebuilt Europe only to throw it to fascism again 100 years later.

[–] zergtoshi@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago

And so the good people of Ukraine continue to not only defend themselves, but a lot more people around the world.
Huzzah!

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