Russian bots and influence operations 'weren't disrupted by Ukraine strikes'

Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy claims that recent attacks on Russia's Yandex data centers led to a drop in Pro-Russian bot operations. However, experts say that there is a need to distinguish between bots, social media trolls, and sophisticated influence operations. Prof Olga Belogolova, from Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, clarified that people often misinterpret data from network and cloud infrastructure company Cloudflare.

The viral Cloudflare screenshot showed a significant drop in bot traffic, but Belogolova cautioned that motivated reasoning led people to think the internet was cleaner and more friendly. Belogolova emphasized that bots are distinct from trolls and that Cloudflare labels non-browser, automated scripts as bots. Cloudflare itself highlighted the need for nuance when examining internet traffic data, stating that bot traffic refers to automated requests to websites on their network, not social media platforms.

After the strikes, Cloudflare data shows that while search crawling halted, malicious bots simply shifted to other networks, and there was no evidence that the attacks disrupted social media manipulation or other malicious internet activities.