Part of Russia's Energy War on Ukraine · 14 stories · since Sep 26 · newest 5m ago
Ukraine hits Russia's Sberbank data center as bot-shutdown claims unravelGuardian, BBC and others question Zelensky's bot claim
5 Oct 13 · 2d ago · 16 articles · 2 videos · 80 posts · 9 comments · 8 sources · development 5 of 8
Mainstream outlets including the Guardian, BBC and Mother Jones examined the viral rumor and concluded there is no solid evidence the strikes disrupted Russian troll operations, framing it as a story people wanted to believe.
“No, a Yandex cloud malfunction did not take down disinformation/troll bots. It's a dangerous misconception.”
@lukOlejnik, researcher · x ↗Volodymyr Zelensky President of UkraineYandex Russian tech company, strike targetSberbank Russian state bank, strike targetFire Point Ukrainian defense companyP. Kallioniemi, Lukasz Olejnik, GossiTheDog, evacide Independent researchers/analysts
The whole story articlesvideospostscomments the bright band is this development · numbered dots are the others · click one to jump
What was reported 1 claim about this development
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first by Mastodon, 1d ago · also Guardian Media
On air 2 segments · click to watch, arrow keys to move
What people said 24 voices · best of 56 · verbatim
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No, a Yandex cloud malfunction did not take down disinformation/troll bots. It's a dangerous misconception. This is not how it works, not even technically. After Ukrainian drones hit Yandex data centers, a viral chart showed Russian "bot traffic" collapsing. But those bots are
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Russia’s digital services are facing widespread outages after Ukrainian drone strikes knocked out three of the largest data centers owned by Russian tech giant Yandex within several days: arstechnica.
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A lot of people I know shared posts about the Yandex datacenter bombing resulting in a decrease in Russian misinformation/disinformation bot activity, sometimes with charts. Let this be a reminder every one of us could be fooled by a story that we really want to be true.
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Some accounts in here are trying real hard to "disprove" this story (libraryaddict and Eyebrows360) so for clarity I thought I'd add info from two other comments that counters their argument. First of libraryaddict says the blackout didn't happen to which someone replied: So the follow-up comment clarified that the referenced 8-hour blackout…
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On October 8-10, Ukraine destroyed 3 data centers in Russia. Since then bot activity has plummeted and so have Google searches for many health misinformation topics. An Unexpected Public Health Victory: Will a drone strike in Russia save lives in the US?
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"Pro-Kremlin bloggers are warning that Russia’s centralized digital economy could collapse because the country is not prepared for the “data center war” it started" - arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026... go for them, zelensky
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RE: https:// hachyderm.io/@evacide/11743496 3703286230 The Yandex decrease in threat activity narrative was a nonsense peddled by the Ukrainian government. People confuse legit search engine bots with social media bots. Russian propaganda operations don’t run from Yandex. They never have. I deal with them all the time on Mastodon. There was no…
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It's a mixture of things. Engagement numbers on right wing accounts dropped 70-90% in some cases. Lots of threads where usually there is a flood of anti-West comments instantly had no such activity suddenly. At first critics claimed it was just a weekend effect, but now it's Tuesday and it's still the same, so that argument is essentially…
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Have the Kremlin bots disappeared? After strikes on Yandex data centers, automated traffic plummeted nearly 250-fold Social media users quickly noticed an interesting coincidence: as traffic dropped, pro-Kremlin bots also appeared to become less active. These accounts flood
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Gee Wilikers, it's a shame I won't get to read the online takes of 'TrumpSuperPatriotWarEagle87622134' anytime soon...
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Ukraine should continue to do this because it will help with keeping many Russian bots from influencing US elections. "On X, Reddit, and elsewhere, users in several Western countries reported seeing less right-wing activity in their feeds, from pro-GOP accounts in the U.S. to supporters of Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party."…
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This whole thread is left wing disinformation against the right wing. There's zero evidence for these claims. There have been no blackout or evidence of less disinformation bot activity anywhere. Those bots don't even run on regular cloud software like what's in those yandex datacenters.
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🇺🇦🇷🇺 Ukraine’s strikes on Yandex didn’t make a dent in Russian bot traffic. Ukraine hit 2 Yandex data centers last week, including the hub that runs most of Russia’s top AI model, and some claimed Russian bot traffic had crashed as a result. But Cloudflare, which tracks a huge
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#Russia was not ready for the #datacenter war it started with #Ukraine
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Jeremy Hsu pointing out - on 13 Oct - that Russia’s getting back what it started (kabooming data centres) is not working out so well for them because: centralised (Ukraine’s are more decentralised, some even underground). Several lessons here in realms from population & business control issues to war tactics & strategy, but what caught my…
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I'm not sure exactly what you did TBH. I just assumed you had something set up to do it, and thought you should share it if you did. I could probably figure it out, but not everyone could, and many who could are either too busy or too lazy.
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Another reason not to want to live by a Data Center. Data Centers will be targets for enemy countries to take out if we are in a conflict. And when we have an idiot president, that will be a potential problem.
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There are reports that troll bots were disrupted and stopped posting after Ukraine attacked the Russian data centers. https:// youtu.be/DXaYdapA6cM # uspol # politics # russia # ukraine # tech # technology
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This should be eye opening for everyone using X or such platforms. Also for governments. Stop communicating on it when they are used to push a far-right agenda with the consent of their owners.
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Ukrainian drone strikes knocked out three of the largest data centers owned by Yandex. These outages highlight how Russia's centralized digital economy is vulnerable to retaliation. Source: arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/10/… #Tech
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Centralization deficits also appear to have caused a notable crash in # misinformation and # disinformation flowing through 'X' etc. Thank you, # ukraine . https:// arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/1 0/russia-was-not-ready-for-the-data-center-war-it-started-with-ukraine/
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Yes. Twitter has been completely transformed. It’s pretty freaky. In Germany, they saw that far-right social media posts dropped by over 90% after the strikes
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cybersecurity analysts clarified that "automated traffic" includes search engine crawlers and general infrastructure tools as well as political propaganda bots Also note
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RE: https:// fed.brid.gy/r/https://bsky.app /profile/did:plc:qciejmtc5bvv4p6bbs4evqct/post/3mxodvukczc2x Do you know of a reliable source that shows a reduction in far-right bots since Ukraine attacked Russia's Yandex? # Russia # Ukraine # X # Yandex # FarRight
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