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

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy asserted that recent strikes on Russia's Yandex data centers led to a decline in pro-Russian bot operations, sparking debate among experts. The issue underscores the necessity to distinguish between bots, social media trolls, and sophisticated influence campaigns, according to Prof Olga Belogolova, director of Johns Hopkins University's emerging technologies initiative.

Prof Belogolova, who previously worked for Meta in combating influence operations, cautioned that people are often misled by data, as seen with a viral Cloudflare screenshot that appeared to show a significant reduction in bot traffic. However, she noted that Russian bot operations typically do not host their infrastructure on Yandex.

Prof Belogolova also criticized the misuse of technical terminology, explaining that bots are distinct from trolls. When a data center is offline, automated web-crawling and indexing traffic also cease. Cloudflare's data supports this, showing that while search crawling stopped following the Ukrainian strikes, malicious bots simply shifted to other networks, indicating no disruption of social media manipulation or other malicious activities.