Did drone strikes on Yandex slow Russian bots? A Ukrainian study finds indirect signs of a partial dip

The Ukrainian NGO CAT-UA has discovered indirect evidence suggesting that pro-Kremlin bot networks experienced a partial decline in activity following Ukraine's October drone strikes on Yandex's data centers, as reported in a study published on November 5th. However, the study acknowledges the effect was not complete. Earlier assessments have sparked debate over the claim, with CAT-UA highlighting that the impact was partial.

Following the strikes, a Cloudflare Radar chart shared by Ukrainian outlet Texty indicated a significant drop in Yandex's bot traffic, though this chart counted automated requests from Yandex's network to websites, not social media bots. US analytics firm Graphika reported no notable change in the activities of AfD, MAGA, and Reform UK communities during the strikes, although declines were observed in Russian-language Telegram channels.

In contrast, the Ukrainian Center for Countering Disinformation reported a sharp decrease in posts by suspected inauthentic accounts on Facebook and Telegram on October 8th and 12th, which coincided with the strikes that halted Yandex data centers in Sasovo and Vladimir. CAT-UA utilized AI to examine 15,000 randomly sampled posts and comments per topic from eight platforms between September 13th and October 12th, with the exception of its own reported drop on October 12th.

The researchers observed a decline in three topics of official Russian propaganda: criticism of Ukraine’s military enlistment offices and claims of a utilities collapse in Kyiv on October 11th, as well as calls for a "peace deal" on October 8th. However, CAT-UA was unable to detect a strike effect in the other two topics due to various factors that might explain the dips.

The researchers cautioned that fading news hooks or sporadic bot activity could account for these fluctuations. Despite these caveats, they cautiously suggested that the Yandex outages could have reduced the activity of certain bot networks with considerable probability. They emphasized the difficulty in confirming such results due to the bots now mostly posting reworded, AI-assisted comments.

CAT-UA also criticized the methods used by the Center for Countering Disinformation as not fully transparent, asserting that their study provides the first reasoned evidence that drone strikes can influence the information war.