Russian Bot Farms Still Trolling Despite Ukrainian Drone Strikes on Yandex
Days after Ukrainian drones downed several Russian data centers, President Volodymyr Zelensky claimed the campaign has damaged Russia's disinformation efforts. "Breathing has become a little easier on many social platforms," Zelensky said Monday. "There was less hatred, less division and fewer provocations." Zelensky is not the first to claim that […]
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Zelensky celebrated "less division" on social media after the strikes, but the data still doesn't support that.
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is a policy reporter at The Verge covering surveillance, the Department of Homeland Security and the tech right.
Days after Ukrainian military drones took down several Russian data centers, President Volodymyr Zelensky claimed the campaign had damaged Russia's disinformation efforts. "Looks just got a little easier to breathe on a lot of social platforms," Zelensky said Monday. "There was less hatred, less division and less provocation."
Zelenskyy is not the first to claim that the drone operation, which targeted data centers owned by Russian tech company Yandex, has curtailed spam and disinformation campaigns fueled by Russian bot farms. Social media users have claimed to have noticed less traffic on posts from accounts affiliated with MAGA, as well as those linked to the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. Some have even said that they have noticed a drastic reduction in spam calls and messages.
But these people are wrong. The drone attacks appear to have affected Yandex's web crawlers, not disinformation or political operations.
In fact, the antibot4navalny account, which tracks state-sponsored troll farms, reports that bot traffic is as steady as ever. On Monday, the same day Zelensky claimed the misinformation had been removed, antibot4navalny reported that several Kremlin-aligned accounts had posted videos falsely claiming experts were urging the EU to lift current sanctions on Russia. Danish analyst Waldemar Ousted said interactions on the MAGA and AfD accounts have actually increased since the strikes. And charts that appear to show a decline in bot activity appear to have been generated by artificial intelligence.
Ironically, the claim that drone strikes have thwarted Russian disinformation campaigns appears to be a form of disinformation itself, regardless of what Zelensky says.
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