No, Ukraine hasn't stopped Russian disinformation bots
I saw some videos on TikTok today of people smugly saying "Xwitter/TikTok sure is quiet since a Ukrainian drone blew up a Russian data center that runs disinformation bots". And they showed this chart/tweet:#
And I thought it odd that a few drones could do such a thing. Mainly from a tech perspective. If all these bots are based in one data centre, surely it would be very easy for social media networks to block them?#
Also, enough time hadn't passed for a person to actually notice a decline in misinformation or far-right comments.#
Well, it looks like it was all nonsense. PixelEnvy has a good summary.#
Yandex – Russia's Google – has had its servers blown up by Ukrainian drones and a lot of its "bots" are offline. But these are just search engine web crawlers. They're not bots that comment on social media. And I think that's where people have got confused, or jumped on this false narrative.#
Actual Russian bot activity appears to be the same as usual according to Cloudflare1 Cloudflare was the "source" a lot of people were using to show that Russian disinformation bots were offline.:#
(Found via @antibot4navalny.bsky.social on BlueSky)#
It's ironic that we've got misinformation about disinformation.#