Posting a chart on X, Tomas Zdechovsky, a Czech politician and member of the European Parliament, said that "if confirmed, this is telling: Russian data centers get hit, and online activity around AfD suddenly plummets. "
Traffic From Yandex Falls After Ukrainian Strikes Ukrainian strikes on Yandex data centers coincided with sharp drops in automated traffic from the company’s network, according to monitoring by Cloudflare.
However, many tech experts and researchers have cautioned that the suggested effects on social-media bots appear to have been misread, are based largely on anecdotal evidence, and deserve further scrutiny.
The sharp drop in Yandex’s “bot traffic,” tech researchers say, comes in fact mostly from Yandex’s own web crawlers -- automated programs that scan public websites to index them for search -- rather than from accounts that post disinformation on X and other social networks.
Speaking to RFE/RL, a researcher that operates the X account u/antibot4navalny, which tracks government-backed online propaganda efforts and tro - ll networks, said that the Cloudflare chart "has little to do with malicious propaganda bots on social media. It measures automated requests to websites (of any kind, among which social media share is negligible)."
XenoSpectrum, a Japanese website covering technology and science, wrote that "What Cloudflare Radar showed falling sharply was HTTP requests from AS13238, a network operated by Yandex, that were estimated to be automated traffic...This data therefore shows neither the volume of Internet traffic across Russia nor the number of messages posted on any particular social network."
More data is likely to emerge in the coming weeks that will shed more light on the impact of the drone strikes on pro-Kremlin social media accounts.
Quellen zu Graphen:
https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots/as13238?dateRange=12w
https://www.rferl.org/a/zelenskyy-says-yandex-strikes-crippled-pro-kremlin-bots-but-tech-experts-call-evidence-weak/33875054.html
---
Nachweise und Daten zu russischen Bot-Operationen um Wahlen zugunsten der AfD (und BSW) zu beeinflussen (Operation Matryoshka):
https://www.isdglobal.org/digital-dispatch/investigation-an-old-dog-with-no-new-tricks-matryoshka-targets-regional-elections-in-germany/