Fact-Check: Misleading Chart on Alleged Russian Bot Activity
Did Attacks on Russian Data Centers Reduce Bot Activity Around Germany's AfD? A Viral Chart Claims It Did, but It Contains Significant Inconsistencies and Offers No Evidence to Support the Claim.
Fact Check: Viral Chart Shows Decline in Alleged Russian Bot Activity
14/10/2026 14 October 2026 Have attacks on Russian data centers reduced bot activity around Germany's AfD? A viral chart claims they did. But it contains significant contradictions and provides no evidence to support this claim.
Following Ukrainian drone attacks on data centers run by Russian technology company Yandex, claims have surfaced online that the attacks have disrupted or even stopped Russian ad bots. These accounts are often accused of spreading false information or artificially boosting content on social media.
During the Warsaw Security Forum, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy also suggested that attacks on Yandex data centers had disrupted bots, saying "there was less hatred, less division and less provocation [because] there were fewer bots."
In a response to the BBC, Zelenskiy's office confirmed that the president was "talking about the atmosphere on social media" rather than pointing to a reduction in bot activity. The bureau added that it had seen "reports of less provocative and hateful comments" from many social media users.
However, so far there is no clear evidence linking these attacks to bot activity reduction.
According to Josef Hollenberger, CEO of the Center for Monitoring, Analysis and Strategy (CeMAS), there is currently "no decline in Russian disinformation activities that can be explained by an attack on Russia's Yandex data centers." CeMAS systematically monitors such campaigns.
European legislator shares undocumented chart on X
However, a misleading chart has been published as hypothetical evidence. For example, Czech MEP Tomas Zdechowski shared. His post was viewed more than four million times on X. He suggested the chart might show a decline in "online activity around the AfD," though he did not specify what kind of activity he meant. In reality, the chart will most likely show nothing.
The German-language chart is titled "Daily Activity Over 3 Months". Its activity appears to have remained relatively stable before a sharp decline in early October, around the same time as the attacks on Yandex data centers. However, nothing in the chart itself suggests that this is related to AfD-related online activity.
The same applies to the underlying chart data. It is not clear which data was used. No source is provided, nor is there an explanation of the data collection process or the calculation method for the claimed "activity," which initially ranges from 6,000 to 7,000 before dropping below 3,000.
Especially noteworthy is that this chart continues until October 15th. Its final data point appears to be Oct. 14 — a date that was still in the future when the chart first appeared online on Oct. 11. Data cannot exist for a future date.
The chart also contains scaling errors on both the X and Y axes. For example, on the Y-axis, the interval between 2500 and 3000 is less than the other 500 unit intervals. Since the Y-axis does not start at zero, the decrease is visually exaggerated. On the X-axis, equal time periods are shown with unequal intervals.
It is also unclear which platforms were analyzed and how the "activity" variable was calculated. The lack of a known data source, incorrect scaling, and inclusion of "future" values strongly suggest that this is not a meaningful chart based on real data and sound statistical methods.
The involvement of artificial intelligence cannot be proven, but it is possible
It is unclear whether artificial intelligence was used to create the chart. Given the errors and the apparent "illusion" of the future data presentation, the involvement of artificial intelligence cannot be ruled out.
Misleading and error-filled charts, some of which may have been created by artificial intelligence, appear regularly. The German public broadcaster #Faktenfuchs team recently reported on one of these graphs that misrepresents industrial production in Germany (article in German). False or fictitious charts can lend credence to unsupported claims.
The identity of the creator of the chart is unknown.
Cloudflare data is also often cited in connection with claims of reduced bot activity. However, according to CeMAS CEO Holnburger, there is a misunderstanding about what Cloudflare's report actually means.
Cloudflare provides services to many websites that block non-human rated traffic. Web auto-traffic is common and includes, for example, crawlers that check websites for newly published content. Search engines, including Yandex, rely on these crawlers. Other bots may be used to spam the comments section.
"Reducing bot activity on websites is a completely different thing than reducing inauthentic social bot behavior on social networks," Hellenberger writes in a message to #Faktenfuchs.
Referring to Cloudflare data, he added: "When we look at the overall activity from Russian IP addresses on servers that use Cloudflare's services, there is no major decrease in bot activity." Furthermore, there is no reason to assume that the infrastructure used by disinformation-related social bots is hosted in Yandex data centers. "These systems are likely distributed across many different providers," Hollenberger writes.
The article was originally written in German and adapted to English by Alima de Graaf.
This article is part of a collaboration between the fact-checking teams of the German public broadcaster ARD-Faktenfinder, BR24 #Faktenfuchs and DW Fact check.
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