A lot of people I know shared posts about the Yandex datacenter bombing resulting in a decrease in Russian misinformation/disinformation bot activity, sometimes with charts. Let this be a reminder every one of us could be fooled by a story that we really want to be true.
Oct 13, 2026, 6:16 PM
Oct 13, 2026, 11:06 PM
@evacide People didn't question it (including me) because the story originated with Zelensky himself.
I saw the story debunking it before I saw Zelenskyy making claims about it, so I went with "maybe it's true" then I saw a story about a decrease in right wing stuff in Canada, but it was also Thanksgiving that day. Maybe they were eating?
@RavenLuni @evacide war propaganda is a viable tactic, even when you're the good guys :/
Oct 13, 2026, 7:25 PMAs propaganda it’s irrefutable. What’s Putin’s reply?
“Zelenskyy is a pathetic liar, Russia’s bot disinformation network continues at full strength in support of AfD, ReformUK, MAGA, One Nation…etc yes we sinister Russians are the real true reason your racist uncle grew racister” ?
@MercG @renardboy @evacide Then theres the question of elon musk - different sources are talking about how his twitter interaction got wiped out
Oct 13, 2026, 8:35 PM@RavenLuni @renardboy @evacide
The best way to test the competing theories is for more data centres to become suddenly offline 😈
@MercG @RavenLuni @evacide This is the way.
@MercG @RavenLuni @renardboy @evacide if I star this comment do I go on a list?
@SomeVeganCheeseIsOk @MercG @RavenLuni @evacide You may already be on the list for using mastodon 🤣
@SomeVeganCheeseIsOk @MercG @RavenLuni @renardboy @evacide
probably not so I'm going to have to boost it to be sure
@MercG @RavenLuni @renardboy @evacide
musk seems to back up the idea of bot decrease.
zelensky is a good reason not to trust the story
@evacide Yep, I've seen that (eg see below) and others saying it's not true.
I'm tending not to believe this is real and think it's more likely that people are seeing a potential meme and jumping on it.
@evacide It really just dropped down scrapper activity, which wasn't nothing. But Yandex is just a shitty Russian search engine, not the endless source of right wing propaganda.
That being said, I saw zero change in the efficacy of my Kagi searches. I wish they'd stop paying them.
@evacide it’s crazy seeing so many people *who should know better* not knowing the difference between the bots that spam logs with requests for Wordpress admin panels and the bots that post slop on Facebook that turns your auntie into a nazi.
Oct 13, 2026, 6:40 PM@hyc @evacide that’s totally true, but it’s not what those graphs are showing! All those “CloudFlare radar” charts just show how many “index.php” requests come out of an AS. To really know if this disrupted the actually dangerous kinds of bots will take some time. Maybe it did, maybe not. Time will tell.
@nbailey Thanks. I was saying the same thing. The bots that *successfully* operate social media accounts aren't bouncing off of Cloudflare over and over.
If it reminds us and provides more attention to the disinformation and even sponsoring Russia is spreading in the West since 1999 I would not mind at all. The only thing is it should activate us to do more much against it.
@evacide your case in point:
"Is Zelensky right to say data centre strikes have taken down Russian bots?"
basically: no
Oct 13, 2026, 7:24 PM@Bredroll Not that I'm aware of, but there are journalists and research teams who keep tabs and will have a good idea. From the article I linked:
"Researchers from dTeam, a US-based group that tracks Moscow-linked influence operations, told BBC Verify there has not been "any traffic change from known Russian accounts and bot clusters on any platform"."
In addition, my understanding is that they largely use botnets and perhaps a some bulletproof hosting.
@Bredroll
No we do not appear to have appropriate metrics nor the ability to measure this; if we did there would be more clarity. I’m not sure the BBC article clarifies much, & after reading many threads on the ‘subject’ I’m not sure we are all talking about the same thing:
“Cloudflare clarified its data includes all automated internet requests to websites hosted on its network, including bots crawling websites for information.
“The company also said the drop off was "not necessarily bot behaviour on social media platforms".”
Not necessarily but also not necessarily not… how does this clarify anything? What I am sure of is that we need to get a lot smarter about this stuff & one idea could be to find a way to integrate the anecdata rather than dismissing so many different peoples’ experiences as ‘confirmation bias’.
@evacide It fooled me indeed.
Thinking about it: there are a million reasons not to use GAFAM datacenters, being a Russian troll farm is not one of them.
@evacide my brain *knew* this was unlikely, and yet…
@evacide By design, almost all in IT have no visibility on the origins or request patterns for social media bots.
Other than Fediverse admins, the others here see the AI scraping bot activity as the majority of their world right now, but that doesn't correlate to the very different social media bot activity.
Oct 13, 2026, 7:03 PM@evacide I think the problem (apart from that Yandex bot chart being misrepresented) is that we don't have reliable statistics for this sort of stuff. I'm guessing Musk does but he's not going to reveal them. But it is curious that he was angry about the Yandex data centres getting blown up.
@evacide The media landscape is psyops all the way down
@evacide to me it’s a sign we need to run more tests.
@evacide Yet another glimmer of hope smashed like a precious vase by a large bovine humorously charging through a pottery establishment.
@evacide ✋ Guilty.
Oct 13, 2026, 7:58 PM
Oct 13, 2026, 8:28 PM@evacide no but see, it can't be a hoax because the datacenter where the bots propagate their hoaxes from, got bombed
@evacide Damn. A shame that the desperation for any kind of good news can make a mark out of any of us.
Yup i did too. Zelenskyy sourced it.
Its so easy to sling words the inherent value has plummeted. And so it goes.
I saw the same with the UK PM's claim that Russia influenced Brexit.
Both of these were disinformation.
They played on the bigotry of a lot of people on mastodon which you identified as something 'we really want to be true.' I would call it Russo-phobia, and some of us are definitely not in the we here.
I expected better of people here, and can only hope there is a bit of personal reflection from the people who posted and boosted these stories.
@evacide You are wrong. I did the math and literally thousands of trolls harassing young female Finnish politicians on Facebook all disappeared at once, at the same time, coinciding with the Yandex explosion. For most profiles I’ve taken reports of numbers dropping at face value, but because of your post and others miming it, I went and did the math. There’s a more than 90 % drop on hateful reactions and comments on the first three profiles I came across that the algorithm recommended to me. I’ve been following the troll traffic on young female politicians’ FB pages for two years now because I fear fascists are trying to influence the next Finnish parliamentary elections by making young women especially too scared to show up. Stories which gaslight and underplay real experiences on mass harrassment have come out in Finnish as a result of comments such as this so I actually find this comment somewhat harmful and as badly sourced as half on the original story. Thankfully I have eyes and a brain and I can check these stats myself on Facebook, and seems at least one user here agrees with my observations.
Oct 13, 2026, 10:50 PMI think she was just critiquing the original cloudflare bot stuff. Any hard data would be welcome.
I can accept if you don't want to trust a random in the Internet who is telling you that a Yandex data centre exploding resulted in 90 % less hate traffic in Finnish women's politics on Facebook, I'm not a data scientist and I'm not in a position to write you a peer-reviewed article on this, but I have spent two years following this because I am worried that women are getting bullied out of politics in this country. Another thing that I find concerning is how even in Finland, where I can go and literally eyeball years worth of reaction stats on lady politicans' posts, the news are giving us a "there are no fake accounts on Social Media and anyone who says so is experiencing a distorted reality that has no connection with facts" when an Afghani-born MPs hater count goes from 500 to 8 overnight after years of steady daily dissing and hating, coinciding with a data centre explosion, and along with other female left politicians' accounts similar stats. And people are dismissing especially women's observations, and I've seen this "people are overreacting / it's a world view disorder" thing quoted in English and Finnish almost word-for-word both in the news and social media, and that is the *actual* tidbit that has *no verifiable source*, no anecdotes, not even a tiny bit of statistical evidence that there is even a single person who has said that the online harassment they've received has stayed constant while they think it has gone away, and I find it fascinating, especially coinciding with the fact that it's not men who are getting targeted by automated accounts, it's women who are getting gaslit.
Oct 14, 2026, 9:33 AM@maijanlainen I was merely contextualising what she was critiquing. The fact the initial chart with Yandex bot data was just about web crawlers rather than social media bots/trolls does not mean they weren't impacted.
Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence, and all that.
And of course I'm prepared to believe there's been a genuine drop in such trolls. It's just frustrating that it's very difficult to quantify.
@davep And the original post appeared to me in a larger batch of similar posts one following up the other, all quoting the Cloudflare stats misuse as source as proof that there are no automated social media accounts on Facebook or other social media websites. I was somewhat blinded by it being eleven o'clock at night and by the context in which it appeared! And of course annoyed because people in Finland where we have an important parliamentary election coming up are using posts like this to prove that all the hundreds of hate posts are natural. That of course is not the OP's fault, and for that I'm sorry, it was entirely my fault @evacide
Oct 14, 2026, 9:45 AMNo worries, you don't necessarily need to explain yourself 🙏
Naah it's good to explain myself, does good for the brain to go over my thoughts, improves thinking.
Oct 14, 2026, 9:53 AM@maijanlainen I can imagine, especially after what seems to have turned into something of a pile on.
@davep It's been horrendous here for the past four years, and there's a new disgrace every week, whether or not it's the PM letting Google destroy the environment and take a nuclear reactor for their own private use, or then it's the out-of-the-closet-neonazi minister of healthcare laughing on camera about women dying of breast cancer in unprecedented numbers because of the cutbacks to healthcare. And it's like this every single week. And record unemployment, record suicides, record bankrupcies. It's a very stressful environment to live in right now, and I can see social media does a lot of heavy lifting for the right wing, so the topic feels important to me.
@snornik @maijanlainen @evacide
“You are wrong”
“…at least one user here agrees with my observations”
What a fucking weird post 🤷🏼♂️
@C0NQUIST4D0R @maijanlainen @evacide
well lets check the data first. that's why i'm asking for it. "did the math" clearly means you have proper data... and statistical models
@snornik @maijanlainen @evacide
For clarity, my reply was directed at @maijanlainen
To further clarify, I’m not asking about his data or models
I’m saying - quite simply and in plain language - that his post is weird
@C0NQUIST4D0R @maijanlainen @evacide
why include me in the reply and answer directly to my post then? new to mastodon? no prob! but please change your attitude. your as weird as the (maijanlainen) post that spawned this.
@snornik @maijanlainen @evacide
Fuck off, you rude twatty little bastard.
I don’t owe you shit but since you mention it I’ve been here since 2017 - and it was glaringly obvious to anyone with half a brain cell (but unfortunately it seems not you) exactly whose post I was criticising. You were included automatically simply cos you were already in the thread
Now go fuck yourself🖕🏻
@C0NQUIST4D0R @maijanlainen @evacide
nobody owes anything to one another except human decency... but well you failed anyway.
😂 thx for this, this is pure gold! at least as a screenshot this is going to survive, as a perfect example.
there is no auto include ;) it matters which reply button you click just as a hint. and old account does not mean anything exactly like a newer account doesn't mean i did not have others before.
Edit: and i hope you know who evacide is where you just posted this
Correction: Apparently there may be auto include on mobile, but it can be edited, it is not forced, not sure which app does what. i never use mastodon on a smartphone platform. i use only linux, but thx @Vak for the clarification!
Oct 14, 2026, 2:01 AM@snornik fyi on mobile, all direct participants are auto-included, unless you immediately backspace, as I have done here.
@Vak really? okay i don't use mastodon (or any platform) on mobile ever. linux only, but thank you for the clarification!
Oct 14, 2026, 2:04 AM@snornik all good 🤙🏽