Days after Ukrainian military drones took down several Russian data centers, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy claimed the campaign had harmed Russia’s disinformation efforts. “It suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social platforms,” Zelenskyy said Monday. “There was less hatred, less division and less provocations.”
Zelenskyy is not the first to claim that the drone operation, targeting data centers belonging to the Russian technology company Yandex, has reduced spam and disinformation campaigns fueled by Russian robot farms. Social media users have said they have noticed less traffic on posts from MAGA-affiliated accounts, as well as those associated with the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. Some have even said they have noticed a sharp drop in spam calls and messages.
But these people are wrong. The drone attacks appear to have affected Yandex web crawlers, not any disinformation or political operations.
In fact, the antibot4navalny account, which tracks state-sponsored troll farms, reports that bot traffic is more stable than ever. On Monday, the same day Zelenskyy claimed the disinformation had died down, antibot4navalny reported that several Kremlin-aligned accounts posted videos falsely claiming that experts demand that the European Union lift ongoing sanctions against Russia. Danish analyst Valdemar Osted said interactions on MAGA and AfD accounts have actually increased since the attacks. And the graphs that supposedly show a decrease in bot activity appear to be generated by AI.
Ironically, claims that drone strikes hampered Russian disinformation campaigns appear to be a form of disinformation in themselves, no matter what Zelenskyy says.
