Yandex Data Center Drone Strikes Hit Web Crawlers, Not Russian Bot Farms, Data Shows
Tracking groups and researchers find no reduction in Russian troll farm operations despite claims following Ukrainian strikes on Yandex infrastructure.
Military drone strikes targeting data centers owned by Russian tech company Yandex appear to have affected web crawlers rather than state-sponsored disinformation networks, according to tracking data and online monitors.
Following the strikes, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy claimed on Monday that the operation had curbed Russian online influence campaigns, saying social platforms experienced "less hate, less division, and fewer provocations." Social media users similarly reported perceived declines in spam communications and engagement on posts tied to right-wing political factions, including the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party and Make America Great Again (MAGA) accounts in the United States.
However, tracking data indicates those claims are unfounded, as reported by The Verge (https://www.theverge.com/news/1010424/yandex-drone-strike-outage-disinformation-zelenskyy). The physical damage to Yandex infrastructure impaired the company's internal crawling and indexing tools rather than independent troll networks.
Monitoring group antibot4navalny reported that state-backed bot activity remained steady after the strikes. On Monday, the group recorded Kremlin-aligned accounts circulating videos falsely claiming that experts were urging the European Union to lift economic sanctions on Russia. Danish analyst Valdemar Osted found that engagement on MAGA and AfD social accounts actually rose following the strikes, while viral charts purporting to show a drop in bot activity were determined to be AI-generated.
Sources
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