The claim quickly picked up speed, and gained specificity: that following the Ukrainian strikes, all kinds of internet users were suddenly less present online, including MAGA accounts, those supporting Reform UK, and ones supporting AfD, the German ultra-right party. A Polish political scientist shared claims that bot activity supporting AfD had dropped by 56 percent, a post that was viewed millions of times and has since been deleted. As Radio Free Europe has reported, a Czech politician shared a similar claim, writing, “So much talk about German patriotism…then the connection from Russia goes down.”

The underlying claim, in other words, was that a great deal of political activity online across a number of countries is inauthentic and led by Russian bots. Their sudden alleged silencing was a simple, feel-good story amidst the endless fight against online disinformation.

“I’m sorry to burst everyone’s bubble, but as of now, there is no solid evidence that Russian bot farms have become inactive.”

The only problem was that it simply wasn’t true.

Tech experts quickly explained that the “bots” that had been taken offline by the Yandex strike were actually bot crawlers, also known as web crawlers, which continually browse the internet in order to index web pages. A widely circulated chart from Cloudflare, the infrastructure company, did indeed show a drop in traffic from Yandex’s servers, which made sense; both the company’s web crawlers and search index requests were disrupted by the bombing campaign.

The first issue, then, was the word “bot,” which “means different things in different contexts, which is contributing to some public confusion,” explains Renee DiResta. She’s an associate research professor at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy, a social media researcher, and a globally recognized expert on disinformation. “It is used as shorthand for both web crawlers and online trolls. Web crawlers plummeting makes sense, but online trolls usually have more resilient infrastructure.”

The second problem, however, was that the ultra-specific claims about less activity in certain areas—MAGA, pro-Kremlin bot accounts, and AfD—had absolutely no basis in fact.

“We see no “dramatic drop” in traffic of Kremlin-aligned human trolls-for-hire targeting Russian domestic users (which we have been tracking for years),” wrote Antibot4Navalny, a group of anonymous researchers who track and respond to Russian disinformation.

Participants in one study tended to “overestimate the prevalence of bots and see others as more vulnerable to bot influence than themselves.”

“I’m sorry to burst everyone’s bubble, but as of now, there is no solid evidence that Russian bot farms have become inactive due to the Yandex data centre strikes,” agreed Vatnik Soup, another group that monitors Russian government-backed disinformation. “This doesn’t mean the strikes haven’t had an effect, but no one has demonstrated it with solid data so far,” the account added. “Many users have reported seeing fewer pro-Kremlin posts and replies since the strikes, and some automated pro-Russian and pro-MAGA accounts have reportedly gone silent. But this could simply be a coincidence.”

“We don’t see it,” tweeted Valedmar Osted, who works at the Scandinavian tech and social media advisory firm Common Consultancy. “We took 76 AfD politicians and 136 MAGA accounts on Facebook. We compared each post with that account’s normal. Same post age. Same weekday. Same time of day. AfD after the strikes: −8% to +5%. MAGA: +4% to +10%. That’s ordinary day-to-day noise.”

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