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

Professor Olga Belogolova, director of the emerging technologies initiative at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, cautioned that the public's enthusiasm for the Ukrainian strikes on Yandex data centers led to a misconception about the impact on Russian bots. The viral Cloudflare screenshot showing a drop in bot traffic is misleading, as it only reflects the cessation of automated requests to Yandex's servers, not the impact on social media trolls or broader internet disinformation campaigns.

Prof Belogolova, who previously led policy at Meta against such operations, emphasized that bots and trolls are not the same, and their confusion by the public can distort understanding of internet threats. Cloudflare's data reveals that while search crawling halted after the strikes, malicious bots merely shifted to other networks, proving that the attacks did not disrupt Russian social media manipulation or overall internet malfeasance.

Yet, Prof Belogolova cautioned that kinetic strikes on Russian tech infrastructure might still have ramifications for Russia's digital economy and cloud services, without being an effective tool to stop foreign influence operations.