"Over the weekend, Ukraine carried out a co-ordinated drone strike against several major Russian data centres. This completely decimated Yandex, their Google equivalent which controls more than 70% of search traffic in the country, and has reportedly resulted in a dramatic fall in bot traffic from the Yandex network.
As per the bot analysts at Tom’s Hardware, bot traffic from the Yandex network has dropped to just 0.4% of the maximum number of HTTP requests recorded in the past two weeks. That means activity from automated, Russian-hosted accounts has been virtually eliminated on social media.
There has already been a strong and significant impact on bot traffic in countries such as France and Germany. David Colon, a French information operations researcher, has noted a huge difference in the performance of narratives generated by the Russia-linked information operations group, Storm-1516.
The silencing of the bots also appears to have caused a dramatic drop in activity around far-right German party, the AfD.
Here in the UK, a similar thing may be happening.
On X, social media posts from Reform figures seem to have taken an engagement hit in the wake of the great bot silencing..."
