Did Ukrainian strikes on Russian datacentres reduce online disinformation?

Original article by Aisha Down

Over the weekend, Ukraine carried out at least three airstrikes on datacentres belonging to the Russian search engine company Yandex. Reports suggest at least two of these datacentres took significant damage, with Telegram footage appearing to show one on fire. Yandex acknowledged the strikes, and Russian media reported that several websites appeared affected by the downed datacentres.

On Monday, Volodymyr Zelenskyy suggested the strikes had dampened Russia’s massive disinformation operation, saying: “It suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social platforms. There was less hate, less division and fewer provocations.”

It is a commendable hope, but experts say the Ukrainian president may have overstated his case.

Did Ukraine’s strikes lead to a decline in Russian disinformation?

Probably not. While a few graphs went viral on social media suggesting there had been a big decline in activity from Yandex bots, those graphs are unrelated to Russian disinformation.

“Our platforms are still monitoring Russian social networks across the world and there is no discernible change in their posting patterns,” said Amil Khan, the chief executive of Valent, a tech startup that tracks disinformation.

Khan and his team track about 40 disinformation networks around the world, from the UK to Australia to Syria, and monitor what narratives they put out and how publics respond to them. They have seen no drop in the volume of posts from these networks, saying: “Yandex datacentres have no practical connection to social media bot farms.”

So what exactly did happen?

Yandex is a search engine which also hosts websites and bots. Data from Cloudflare, which monitors worldwide internet traffic, shows a marked decline in activity from bots associated with the Yandex network on 8 October and 11 October, corresponding to the dates of two of the strikes.

The independent Russian news outlet Meduza reports that a number of websites in Russia are down: major banks, retailers, sports apps and Yandex’s services such as Yandex Go and Yandex Eats. It suggests the damage took out a large part of Yandex’s operation and could take months to fully repair.

Some online commentators have mistaken the Cloudflare data to mean that the decline in bot activity has led to a major drop in disinformation on social media. But this is not what experts have noticed.

What are these different kinds of bots?

“The term ‘bot’ can mean many different things,” said Michał ‘Rysiek’ Woźniak, an internet infrastructure expert. “When Cloudflare data shows a precipitous drop in ‘bot’ traffic, that does not mean ‘automated social media troll accounts’, it means ‘software that makes automated web requests on a large scale.’” What Cloudflare picked up was a decline in activity from Yandex’s web crawlers. These are used by search engines to index websites and help users to find them, said Khan.

State-sponsored disinformation networks – the kind of “bots” a lot of people misinterpreted this as – could still be affected by the strikes, said Woźniak. “But those effects are going to be much more indirect.”

Those networks are far more distributed, and more resilient, said Ned Mendez, the head of research at Alliance4Europe. “Platforms will routinely flag traffic from datacentres as likely automated, so serious bot operations run more through distributed methods, such as residential connections and phone farms, that airstrikes can’t really knock out.”

So how could Ukraine disrupt Russian disinformation in Europe?

“We can’t simply bomb the bots out of existence, however appealing that might sound,” said Mendez. “They aren’t really a single set of buildings that can be switched off.”

Khan said the Ukrainians could consider taking action against companies such as the Internet Research Agency, Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner-linked troll farm that was engaged in influence operations until 2023. But another tactic could be to work with Europe to disrupt the supply chain and recruitment pipeline of private sector contractors used by the Kremlin.

Another tactic could be to pressure big social media companies to moderate disinformation on their platforms. Khan’s team has successfully worked with Meta to tamp down on inflammatory content in Sudan.

But, said Khan, the Trump administration would probably push back on this, hard. “I can see why blowing up datacentres is an easier option.”