I sent out a positive story a day or two ago. Turns out it was inaccurate, though it wasn't fake, it was just incorrect. Here's the explanation.
--Kim
Yeah, the whole “Russian bots are offline because Ukraine” story turns out to be bogus.
Too bad.
Welp.
I posted that Ukraine had knocked out Russia's bot farms by hitting a Yandex data center - and a commenter told me I was spreading misinformation. I was annoyed for about four minutes, and then I went and checked - and they were right.
And the real story is wilder than the one I posted.
Ukraine hit three Yandex data centers in four days. Sasovo went down October 8, a chunk of Kaluga on October 9, and Vladimir on October 11. Zelensky called it mirror-like payback for Russia bombing Ukrainian data centers all September.
A bunch of stuff powered by these stopped loading for an afternoon. That part was real.
The part I got wrong was the chart.
It came from Cloudflare Radar, and it showed automated traffic from Yandex's network falling to 0.4% of its two-week peak. And it wasn’t just me that shared it - everybody was sharing it.
Frank Luntz - the pollster and political talking head - posted that Russian bot traffic had plummeted. Historian Timothy Snyder called it a quick take but said it sure looked like pro-Trump and pro-AfD bot work runs on Russian servers. Czech MEP Tomáš Zdechovský said chatter around Germany's AfD fell off a cliff.
Earlier today - Zelensky was saying everyone noticed social media got easier to use. I was in very credentialed company.
But Cloudflare counts any automated request hitting a website as bot traffic.
I should have known this - because I use Cloudflare and have spent hours inside of it learning how to use it.
If you knock out a search company's data centers - the first thing that will die is its crawler, the little program that visits every website on earth so Yandex search knows what's on them. If you have a website - you know that you can set it to be crawled by Google or turn it off.
That's what went to zero. Not trolls. Robots doing chores.
The group antibot4navalny, people who literally spend their days hunting Kremlin sock puppets, said the chart has nothing to do with social media. Russia's overall bot numbers looked like any other week. And Yandex was already climbing back by Sunday.
So nobody silenced the trolls. Somebody unplugged Russia's Roomba.
The rest of what I found was so obvious it’s embarrassing.
Real Russian bot farms don't post from Yandex servers in the first place.
Facebook and Reddit started blocking traffic from known Russian corporate data centers back in 2022. So the farms rent their disguises from us. Residential proxies, hacked smart devices, VPNs, and Western cloud hosting, all so an account run out of Moscow looks like a guy in Ohio.
And yeah - there’s receipts.
In July 2024 the Justice Department took down Meliorator, an AI bot farm built by an RT editor with FSB officers in the loop. Nearly a thousand fake X accounts pretending to be Americans, including a bitcoin investor in Minneapolis who didn't exist. The email domains used to create those accounts were bought from Namecheap - a company in Arizona.
If you wanted to burn down the servers Russia's trolls actually depend on, you'd have to start a lot closer to home.
I'll defend myself a little, cause the reason this story was so easy to believe is that it has happened before.
When Israel hit Iran in June 2025 and the country's internet collapsed, about 1,300 fake "Scottish" accounts went silent at once. Nurses and Glaswegian socialists who'd been posting all day suddenly had nothing to say. When Iran pulled the plug again this year during protests, same accounts, same silence. Emily Thornberry brought it up in a House of Commons committee.
That worked because the whole country went dark, including the guys at the keyboards. Russia's internet didn't go dark. One company's search engine got a concussion.
These are the people who spend all year warning us about disinformation, and the second a chart told us a story we liked, we hit share without asking what it measured. Me included.
Caroline Orr Bueno, a behavioral scientist who studies this stuff for a living, basically begged everyone to knock it off. If you want to defend democracy, you have to reject the lies that flatter you too.
That's the uncomfortable part. A misread crawler chart got more reach in one weekend than most Russian sock puppets get in a year, and it was pushed by real, verified humans with good intentions. The Kremlin didn't have to lift a finger. The algorithm rewarded the version that felt good, and we did the rest.
So thank you to the commenter.
My bad.
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