Ukraine has attacked three data centres used by Russia's Yandex over the past week. Source: SBS News
Ukraine has launched strikes on three data centres used by Russian technology platform Yandex over the last week. Several posts claiming a resulting decrease in Russian bot activity have been widely circulated.
A series of Ukrainian strikes on data centres in Russia had Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy claiming an additional win.
"When our strikes reached Yandex’s data centres, it suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social media platforms," he told participants at the Warsaw Security Forum this week.
"There was less hate, less division, and fewer provocations. Because there were fewer bots."
Russia had previously targeted Ukrainian data centres and telecommunication infrastructure.
But as the latest round of strikes had users celebrating a drop in Russian misinformation, experts say the reality is more complicated.
A change in web traffic
In the past week, Ukraine has struck three of the five main data centres used by Russian technology company Yandex, often considered Russia's version of Google.
A widely shared graph of data from US tech firm Cloudflare showed a sharp drop-off for bot traffic shortly after one of the strikes.
A Polish political scientist shared a post linking the strikes to a sharp drop in activity supportive of Germany's far-right AfD party. He later deleted the X post after finding the graph was AI-generated, but it had already circulated widely. A similar graphic was also shared by a Czech member of the European Parliament on X.
The Ukrainian strikes damaged Yandex infrastructure, with a Kremlin spokesperson saying the provider was "currently facing difficulties".
Yandex is used for search, email, file storage, food delivery, ride-sharing, and more in Russia. Source: AAP / Kirill Kukhmar
Olivia Shen is the director of strategic technologies at the United States Studies Centre. She says while a drop in bot traffic from Yandex has been observed, there has been no definitive evidence that it resulted in an impact on dis- or misinformation.
"A company like Yandex has bots crawl on the internet all the time, but they do really basic things like indexing web pages and optimising its search engines, just as you would expect Google to do," she said.
"So, it's not really surprising that when the Yandex data centres are taken out of action, there's fewer Yandex bots sending out automated requests to websites.
"Not all bots are equal, and they don't all do the same thing."
What are bots?
The term bot is used to describe any automated process completed online. It's also, however, often used to describe the actions of malicious actors.
Dr Kateryna Kasianenko studies how online searching practices relate to real-world crises. She said Cloudflare uses a broad definition of bots.
"There is a chance that what we call social media bots on Russia's side would have been impacted by [the strikes]. But the extent of that is quite hard to evaluate at this stage,"
"It's been really interesting to see the attempts to actually evaluate whether or not there was indeed a drop in engagement or also the spread of problematic narratives on Russia's behalf and actors that Russia may support, like AfD, Donald Trump and others.
"The evidence so far is quite mixed."
Kasianenko says it has brought more attention to "the mechanics behind Russia's efforts to control [the] information space".
She says it's quite hard for a regular user to accurately identify whether something online was created by a person or a bot, especially when the interaction involves amplification, such as liking and reposting content.
"Russia does deploy a mixed approach where they have these very handcrafted, deliberate human messages, and they also use automation for things like amplification, retweeting and likes,"
"It's very hard to know whether those types of engagements were generated by a human or an automated account."
Shen says this is further complicated by a tendency to label difficult viewpoints as bots, rather than grappling with the complexity of differing beliefs held within Russia.
"I don't think just dismissing those views, those legitimately held views as mis- or disinformation, or as the behaviour of bots, is helpful in bridging those gaps between Russians and Ukrainians or Russians and the rest of the world,"
A perceived decline in pro-Russian views online could be explained by Russian citizens not being able to access the internet, instead of damage to bot networks.
Dr Olga Boichak, a senior lecturer in digital cultures at the University of Sydney, researches the weaponisation of digital technologies. She says we need more research to empirically prove whether a sizeable reduction in the amount of troll and bot messaging has occurred. Shen said this situation is "a perfect opportunity for a natural experiment to actually collect the data on that".
The physical dimension of misinformation
Boichak said these strikes have exposed a critical vulnerability: "physical infrastructure matters".
Mis- and disinformation are normally treated as activities happening online, but she said the breadth of potential forms it can take makes it difficult to contain.
"Not all of them involve spreading falsehoods. Sometimes it would be manufacturing a few competing versions of truth. Sometimes it would be circulating different rumours. Sometimes it will be circulating memes. Sometimes it would be bullying and harassment of the people who are activists or working in some space,"
"Our traditional containment methods sometimes fall short because they don't recognise something as an influence operation.
"I think that is a big lesson here that democracies need to consider various other ways, ways that are deeper in the infrastructural levels to contain these attempts and disinformation."
Data centres are becoming an increasingly acceptable military target, according to Shen.
"I think that's a bit concerning because this is digital infrastructure that takes down the internet for a lot of ordinary users, not just military operatives or people deliberately spreading influence campaigns,"
Boichak says Russia's regime of "digital authoritarianism" makes damage to physical infrastructure more severe, with much of the country reliant on Yandex, as a result of the ongoing blocking of Western platforms.
