When Ukraine targeted three data centers belonging to the Russian technology and AI firm Yandex recently, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy mentioned that the attacks had led to a sudden decrease in pro-Russia bot activities.
Zelenskyy conveyed during the Warsaw Security Forum via video link that there was a noticeable reduction in hate speech, division, and provocations on several social media platforms after the strikes on Yandex data centers. He implied that the absence of bots coincided with Yandex going offline.
The claims made by the Ukrainian president regarding the impact of the attacks on curbing pro-Russia disinformation were widely circulated on social media platforms. However, some experts are questioning the validity of these assertions, suggesting that the interpretation of data on bot traffic following the drone strikes may be misleading.
A visiting senior research fellow at the Department of War Studies at Kings College London, Łukasz Olejnik, cautioned against the misconception that the reduction in bot activity indicated the end of influence operations. He emphasized that the disruption caused by the strikes on Yandex’s services did not necessarily translate to a significant decline in pro-Kremlin activities.
Yandex, often referred to as Russia’s equivalent of Google, suffered service disruptions across multiple regions due to the airstrikes on its data centers. This affected users in various Russian cities, Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Armenia, limiting their access to services like taxi bookings and online banking.
Samuel Woolley, a researcher at the University of Pittsburgh specializing in disinformation, pointed out that it was an exaggeration to suggest that propaganda bot traffic declined following Ukrainian attacks on Russian data centers. He highlighted the complexity of tracking all propaganda bots and cautioned against assuming that all Russian bot activities ceased due to the strikes.
The interpretation of a decline in online automated traffic following the strikes on Yandex data centers was questioned by experts. While acknowledging a decrease in automated traffic from Yandex’s search engine crawler, it was clarified that this didn’t necessarily affect the automated bots responsible for spreading disinformation on social media platforms.
Overall, the impact of the attacks on Yandex’s data centers on Russian propaganda networks and the broader issue of online disinformation remains a complex and ongoing challenge. Experts emphasize that dismantling a few data centers is unlikely to fully address the widespread issue of Russian influence operations, which involve various tactics and platforms beyond Yandex.