A chart circulating on social media that appears to show a steep drop in bot traffic after attacks on Yandex servers does not reflect the automated accounts that spread disinformation, according to the troll farm exposer known as antibot4navalny. In a thread on X, the account said the data has nothing to do with social media. The chart, which cites Cloudflare data, has been widely interpreted as evidence that Russian bot farms were disrupted by strikes on the technology company often described as Russia's Google.
According to antibot4navalny, the chart actually measures requests from automated Yandex web crawlers. Such bots have a broad range of uses, including indexing websites for search engines and providing customer service support. They can also be used maliciously to hack user accounts and target people with spam. The data is specific to Yandex-based traffic rather than bot activity from Russia as a whole, which Cloudflare says remained largely unchanged around the data center attacks.
Separate charts have also been shared claiming the same decline in Russian disinformation bot activity. European Parliament member Tomáš Zdechovský posted one such diagram on X, saying online activity around the far-right Alternative for Germany party plummeted after the Russian data center attacks. Computer scientist Raphael Wimmer said he suspects the source diagram shared by Zdechovský is AI-generated. Wimmer pointed to inconsistencies with the activity timeline it supposedly tracks, including a data point logged for a future date, October 15th.
The image appears to have first been posted by Threads user Robin Schlingheider. The source of the data is not established, and the original image does not include any reference to Germany's AfD party. Wimmer said Schlingheider has evaded his questions about where the image came from. Wimmer asked whether people, and especially politicians, journalists and scientists who should know better, could stop sharing unverified images.
Meanwhile, most Yandex-operated systems still appear to be offline following the latest drone strike. The affected services include the Yandex Pay digital payment service, leaving users unable to transfer funds, check balances, or make purchases. Yandex Fintech head Dima Pirogov said in a statement, translated via Google, that the company cannot yet give a precise restoration timeline. He said the company promises it will not stop until the service is restored.
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