The Probably Fake Russian Troll Exodus

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…