Zelensky Credits Ukrainian Attacks on Data Centers With Reducing Bots on Social Media

President Volodymyr Zelensky says Ukraine’s attacks on Russian data centers are reducing the impact of bot farms that seek to sow discontent and division, though it’s unclear the amount of traffic that has been stopped with the recent strikes.Ukraine, in the past week, targeted three data centers operated by Yandex, a company referred to as the Google of Russia. Yandex called the data centers the “iron heart” of its services critical for services that have become part of everyday life for millions of Russians. Many of the company’s systems were knocked offline, including its Venmo-like payment platform. That outage blocked users’ access to their money.“Our technologies help hundreds of thousands of companies run their businesses: accept orders, provide customer service, and interact with partners,” Yandex said on Telegram. It said it was working to restore services sub called the extensive damage.Data analysts claim that the strikes have also affected bot traffic from the Yandex network. The online technology publication Tom’s Hardware shared data from internet infrastructure company Cloudflare that showed automated traffic on the Yandex network fell 94 percent on Sunday compared with its average levels.Social media posters have equated that drop in bot traffic to fewer fake social media posts sharing Kremlin-directed messaging online. Pollster Frank Luntz shared the Tom’s Hardware article on bot traffic to his 400,000 X followers.Mr. Zelensky is also crediting the attacks on a drop in divisive social media posts, noting that it is “pretty clear” the bots were coming from Russia.“When our strikes reached Yandex’s data centers, it suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social media platforms. A lot of people noticed it. There was less hate, less division, and fewer provocations because there were fewer bots,” Mr. Zelensky said Monday in a speech at the Warsaw Security Forum. A Czech member of the European Parliament, Tomáš Zdechovský, posted an image that purported to show online activity around the far-right AfD party in Germany had also rapidly dropped in recent days. “If confirmed, this is telling: Russian data centres get hit, and online activity around AfD suddenly plummets,” Mr. Zdechovský said in an X post.But some internet experts are not convinced the data center strikes are the cause of any drop in Kremlin-directed social media activity.“The data just shows a temporary drop in automated requests — meaning the Yandex crawler, which is among the largest in the world, and routine commercial traffic — not social media bots,” University of California San Diego professor Branislav Slantchev said. A crawler is a type of bot that is used to look at and index web pages while a social media bot is a software program that automates tasks on the internet, such as responding to posts on social media.“I would be surprised if there was any effect on pro-Kremlin activity on social media because the Russian bot farms use Western access points and their messages are spread by real Western useful idiots,” Mr. Slantchev said.A technology and artificial intelligence professional, Tom Finnell, said the data from Cloudflare, which records internet access points to nearby locations, are being misinterpreted. “That chart measures Yandex’s own web crawlers, the programs that index websites for search. It doesn’t count accounts posting replies on X,” Mr. Finnell said. Mr. Finnell said only Elon Musk’s X could say if Russian bot traffic was falling off a cliff. “Real troll farms hide behind VPNs, proxies and Western cloud servers. Knocking out Yandex wouldn’t touch them,” he said. Mr. Musk has not commented publicly.

Zelensky Credits Ukrainian Attacks on Data Centers With Reducing Bots on Social Media

Zelensky Credits Ukrainian Attacks on Data Centers With Reducing Bots on Social Media

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