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🟢 LOW CREDIBILITY: We find that viral claims that drone strikes on Yandex data centers in Russia have impacted coordinated inauthentic social media activity are misstated and unfalsifiable. Treat such claims with skepticism, and bookmark this tracker. russianbots.america2.news

russianbots.america2.newsThe Russian Bot Collapse Report: did Russia's bots really go quiet?A sourced, live check on the viral claim that Ukraine's strikes on Yandex data centers silenced Russian social-media bots: what the data measures, what it doesn't, and who is spreading which claims.

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We don’t trust any news outlets. No… we’ve personally seen the huge drop off in dirty russian bot activity. We don’t need you to try to explain it away. We’re completely capable of recognizing the drop off all by ourselves. But thanks, comrade

We will assess new claims as they come in. Russia’s information warfare operations are heterogeneous and distributed, often entrepreneurially, and generally operate in other countries. To the extent Yandex strikes may impact such operations, they would likely be...

in the area of toolchain dependencies: email, payments, AI, translations, etc. which can generally be swapped out for other solutions. Strikes on Yandex overall are good strategic moves for Ukraine as they impact domestic operations and state information processing capacity.

However any value such strikes may bring to information warfare operations is speculative and unproven. Our assessment is to not diminish the threat Russian information operations still pose, and to continue fighting on both of these fronts as if they are separate, if interrelated, concerns.

Just spoke to the Kyiv Independent and they are also sorting through these claims. Expect some informed coverage from them soon.

This is one of those 'Nice if it's true' stories out there, in which I would like it to be true, but I'll wait for more information to come out. Thank you for looking into this matter, will be bookmarking this in case things change or new info comes to light 👍

The danger is if it isn't true but people think it is, Russian information operations continue with impunity because they were never really hindered in the first place. That seems to be the best assessment as of right now.

Very true, we want to make certain that Russian bot farms are out of commission instead of just taking things at face value. Agreed.

If it's not true, we need to figure that out. And fast. Because the consequences of incorrectly believing it to be true could be just as bad as incorrectly believing it to be false.

Right now there are a lot of people making claims that are either unfalsifiable, untrue, or simply fabricated. There is no data-based evidence to point to because there is no one central way to measure this outside of the platforms themselves, and they aren't talking.

IIRC, there used to be an organization in the late 1990s early 2000s that monitored and assessed internet traffic for international threats. I don't remember their name, or if they still exist. It might have been related to SpamCop, somehow.

There are a decent number of such think tanks doing that kind of work but it has become much harder in recent years. So far nothing credible has emerged with a data-driven analysis.

Yes, included that analysis in our sourcing. Overall there just isn't evidence to support the claims as of right now, though such evidence could conceivably emerge. The downside of being wrong here is that RU info ops continue unabated and unhindered.

Yes, we all want this to stop. But if it was easy to stop, we would have simply blocked Yandex's ASN years ago and it would not be happening. It's a problem because they bypass easy digital controls; so physically blowing up datacenters is low marginal yield.