The widespread story that Russia’s foreign interference bot army had been taken off line by Ukraine’s strikes on Yandex data centres was an easy one to believe. It fit a narrative that has already been sewn and confirmed our own biases. Mostly, it proved that nobody is immune from the disinformation trap.
There is little empirical data supporting the claim that there was a dramatic drop in far-right robotic social media posts. Web crawlers were significantly impacted, and in the tech world, those, too, are considered bots. But those weren’t the droids we were looking for.
The story was breaking when I was preparing my last essay, and I started writing on the premise that this story was true. Social media had it everywhere with people posting “bot test” with topics like vaccines, Trump’s history of sexual assault allegations, and other topics that activates troll bots. I went to the source, looking at X (twitter to everyone except the twit that bought it) posts, Truth Social, and so forth looking for any kind of distinct change in post engagements. I was surprised to find no obvious change in patterns, and refocused my writing accordingly.
Anna Merlan at Mother Jones wrote an excellent essay called “Drone strikes didn’t take out a Russian bot farm, but we were primed to believe it" a day after Emerald Book posted an equally important piece on the topic “Why the Russian Data Center Strike Had Zero Effect on Social Media Bots.”
Cloudfare, whose own data was often cited as proof that Ukraine had shut down the troll bots, wrote their own explanation Wednesday as well: Yandex outage: Data shows that instead of going dark, malicious bots went on the move. Since, there have been numerous other stories on the topic.
Ukraine’s attacks did, without a doubt, seriously impact internet activity both within and coming from Russia, including automated vulnerability scanning and web crawling, but it had no measurable impact on the social media disinformation campaign that so many people assumed and believed. Those mostly live on hacked devices, spread across the internet and controlled through relays to mask their origins.
The Betoota Advocate posted a story entitled: “Trump Accuses Ukraine Of Midterm Election Interference After Russian Bot Farm Strikes” and there was a widely shared X post alleged to be from a Republican congressman that similarly claimed that the Ukraine attack on Yandex amounted to interference in the American mid-term elections. It does not take much analysis to conclude that a site called the “Betoota Advocate” is satire. The feed of the supposed congressman was also a satirical account, and has since been entirely removed from X.
As a result of these satire posts, there are widespread claims on social media claiming that the Republicans are accusing Ukraine of election interference by attacking the Russian bot farms hosted at Yandex. Neither aspect of the claim is true. The bots hit were not social media bots, and the Republicans have made no such claims.
There are, however, real, significant, and related issues that really are taking place. After the Yandex attacks, Starshield, the military version of SpaceX’s Starlink, was slowed for the Ukrainian military and temporarily disabled for devices exceeding 100 mph. This in turn disabled part of Ukraine’s air defences just long enough to allow a Russian attack to get through to Kyiv, disabling power plants and killing at least nine people. Several news outlets around the world are saying this came as a direct order from Donald Trump, though he denies it. It has also been credited as Elon Musk’s idea, although he, too, denies it.
As Starshield’s Ukraine access is under the control of the US military and is operated by SpaceX, one of the two of them had to have taken the decision to impede Ukraine’s access to the system ahead of a Russian attack. As The Telegraph reports, Musk asked Trump to do it.
While the bot farms were not hosted at Yandex’s data centres, it is entirely possible that some sensitive crypto-related assets, bank records, or other valuable data were destroyed. Whether it was related to Trump’s direct conversation with Putin last week over a diesel deal, revenge for attacking Yandex, or just the predictable actions of a probable Russian agent running the White House, we will probably never know for sure.
With so many real issues taking place, it is important to focus on those that can be fact checked, for which clear evidence exists. The disinformation world cannot become double-sided, into a game of who can convince more people of their particular lies. Tomorrow’s referendum in Alberta, for example, is an existential fight between disinformation and reality, and sticking to the facts has been critical to the credibility of the federalist cause.
It is easy to believe that Russia’s election interference bot network, which we do know exists, can be destroyed by a bomb hitting a handful of data centres in the country. It is easy to believe that losing that right wing troll bot farm would impact the upcoming mid-term elections in the United States, and that Republicans would blame Ukraine for interference on the basis of the attack. Spreading the memes stating ‘facts’ for which there is no evidence is to do a disservice to democracy.
It is important to stick to reality, and to remember that everyone, not only people on the far right, may be prone to falling for easy-to-believe memes and false information.
The message here is simple. Trump, MAGA, and Russia’s continuing interference to undermine democratic institutions will not be defeated by spreading false information. We must remain vigilant. We cannot defeat them by becoming them.