The Probably Fake Russian Troll Exodus ⇥ br.de

After Ukrainian forces struck several data centres belonging to Russian internet services giant Yandex, a couple of charts began circulating social media purportedly showing a decline in traffic from Russian bots. The narrative suggested — by people like political scientist Ian Bremmer, journalist Jamie Dupree, TPM’s Josh Marshall, and historian Timothy Snyder — is that these attacks silenced a noticeable number of automated troll accounts on X, particularly those promoting far-right talking points.

This does not appear to be true.

There are two charts in question. The first, as posted by Dupree and others, is sourced from Cloudflare data indicating a precipitous drop in Yandex bot traffic. But, as Jowi Morales writes at Tom’s Hardware, this does not show a reprieve from nefarious users:

Yandex is Russia’s equivalent to Google, and its Yandex Cloud service status reports that at least 84 services are currently offline. Global internet monitoring firm NetBlocks said that Yandex’s network traffic has dropped to just 30% for Yandex Cloud and 63% for Yandex LLC, most likely resulting in slower internet services or complete disruption for the average Russian. […]

Yandex operates search engine crawlers, just like Google, which are referred to as “bots”. This is, in part, what these data centre strikes took out, and the reason Cloudflare is seeing a big drop in traffic from Yandex.

The other chart is a doozy. It was popularized in an X post by Tomáš Zdechovský, a Member of the European Parliament for the Czech Republic, though its original source is unknown. It purportedly shows a massive recent decline in social media posts promoting the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party, with Zdechovský suggesting “[s]o much talk about German patriotism… then the connection from Russia goes down. 🤔🇷🇺” But the chart itself does not indicate this is AfD-related traffic at all. The title translates to “daily activity over 3 months” — but “daily activity” of what, exactly, is not defined.

Max Gilbert, of German public broadcaster Bayerischer Rundfunk, looked into the chart and found it was full of problems (this is how Safari translated the article for me):

It is striking that the graph on the 15th October ends, so a date in the future. According to #Faktenfuchs-Recherche, the graphic was first published on the 11th. Posted in October. That data is available for an already future date is obviously not possible.

[…]

Which platforms were examined here, how the variable “activity” comes about: All this remains unclear. The unknown or possibly non-existent data base as well as the inaccurate scaling and values “from the future” show that this is not a meaningful, fact-based graphic created according to statistical methods.

Tom Wannenmacher, of Austrian fact-checking site Mimikama, also published a good explanation of the two charts. And overall Russian bot traffic has not really declined recently.

Unfortunately, these charts and their narrative have been circulating widely for days and, I bet, will live on as a kind of orphaned factoid among the terminally online. It is disappointing how uncritically these charts were accepted. There are, of course, disinformation networks and state propaganda all over social media. But when we focus too much on the involvement of foreign actors and unhinged trillionaires in our dire political state, we may forget how much of it is grown right here and self-inflicted.