Zelenskyy’s office softens claim Yandex strikes cut bots

Disinformation researchers and fact-checkers say they have found no evidence that Ukrainian drone strikes on data centers run by Russian tech company Yandex reduced pro-Kremlin bot activity online. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's office has since said his remarks were about the general mood on social media, not a measured drop in bots.cbc+1

Zelenskyy made the claim on Monday, Oct. 12, in a video address to the Warsaw Security Forum. "It suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social media platforms," he said. "There was less hate, less division and fewer provocations. Because there were fewer bots". He added that it was "pretty clear where those bots were coming from — if they disappeared when Yandex went offline".cbc

Asked about the remarks by BBC Verify, his office said the president was "talking about the atmosphere on social media" rather than a fall in bot activity. It said it had seen "reports of fewer provocative and hateful comments" from many users.bbc

No drop in tracked networks

Ukrainian monitoring company LetsData checked networks on X and Facebook that it attributes to Russia's influence operations, including accounts spreading a new wave of the Doppelgänger campaign, which clones real news sites. Co-founder Ksenia Iliuk told Euromaidan Press the networks look unaffected: none has stopped posting or broken its usual weekly rhythm. One network that recently pushed fake Die Welt sites about Germany's elections now shares a fake Ukrinform site about mobilization in Ukraine. Iliuk said the strikes could still have affected networks the company does not track.euromaidanpress

Researchers at dTeam, a U.S. group that monitors Moscow-linked operations, told BBC Verify they saw "no change in traffic" and that bots tied to the Storm-1516 and Matryoshka campaigns were still active on Tuesday. Josef Holnburger of the German monitoring center CeMAS told DW there was "no decline in Russian disinformation activities that could be explained by the attack".dw+1

A misread chart

Much of the claim online rests on Cloudflare ↘ 6.72% data showing automated traffic from Yandex's network falling sharply after the first strike on Oct. 8. Cloudflare said the drop "does not necessarily indicate bot activity on social media platforms". Lukasz Olejnik of King's College London told CBC the data reflected Yandex's search crawler, not social media accounts, and called the "bots went silent" story "misinformation". Samuel Woolley of the University of Pittsburgh said "it makes total sense if you attack Yandex, that automated traffic online would go down". DW found that one viral graph included a data point for Oct. 14, even though it first appeared online on Oct. 11.mashable+3

The strikes, which hit sites in Sasovo, Kaluga and Vladimir, did disrupt Yandex services in Russia and several neighboring countries. The question carries weight beyond Ukraine. At the same forum, Lithuania's prime minister suggested allies could ask Kyiv to strike more data centers to protect European elections from interference.cbc+1

"Troll farms hide behind proxies, hijacked devices and Western clouds," Olejnik wrote. "They're still operating".cbc