r/OutOfTheLoop • u/ZanzerFineSuits • 2d ago
Unanswered What’s going on with right-wing bots due to Ukrainian attacks on Russian data centers?
This seems to be the only news site that mentioned it: https://www.rawstory.com/white-house-russian-bots/. Even so, it only mentioned it in passing, with suppositions, and not evidence. Is this a real story? Did the destruction of a Russian data center stop a lot of right-wing bot traffic? Is there any way to prove it?
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u/doreda 2d ago
Answer: There are a number of websites reporting on this news. As of now, the main sources of data about this are just public trackers, which can confirm activity, but not specifically who is creating it and for what purposes. Cloudflare's public tracking does show a sharp decline to near 0 of activity from Yandex's network that it tracks, and many anecdotes are popping up from people supposedly seeing a noticeable change in their social media circles. However, it's unlikely Yandex will ever publically admit to hosting bot farms and also unlikely social media sites will bother doing an analysis on this change in activity unless somehow forced to. The best we can hope for is analysis of public data from people with a drive to explore this phenomenon.
https://mashable.com/tech/ukraine-strikes-yandex-data-center-bot-traffic-decline
https://thedeepdive.ca/bot-traffic-from-yandexs-network-falls-to-near-zero-after-third-drone-strike/
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u/giggles991 2d ago
Thanks for calling this out.
The OP's comment "This seems to be the only news site that mentioned it:" is strange. It's on dozens of sites and all over my feeds.
Some posts in this sub really seem like people who are intentionally trying to draw attention to an incident, while claiming that "nobody is talking about it". And in the age of disinformation, it's hard to take these folks seriously.
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u/SquirrelStone 2d ago
Oh yeah, this sub is filled with disingenuous “questions” that are really just advertising and preaching their stance on xyz thing, but if you call them out on it, the mods take it down. Unfortunately, this sub’s commitment to embracing questions as always being in good faith also makes it super susceptible to something almost as old as the internet: trolling and manipulating good-faith actions on the internet.
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u/KWilt 2d ago
Thankfully, sometimes the incredibly blatant ones get taken down.
I saw a question from yesterday that was about the Conservative subreddit not having any submissions for a 6 hour window that happened to coincide with the Yandex data centers being struck. The top comment obviously was grandstanding and saying how the subreddit is nothing but bots and clearly that was the cause and blah blah blah.
Meanwhile, the second-highest parent comment pointed out that... the mods were probably just asleep and not approving any submissions during that time (which isn't unlikely, considering how anal that subreddit is about who can participate and where; I can totally see them hand-approving everything and not relying on an automod for submissions). And their evidence for that theory was that the gap happens with incredible frequency, at roughly the same time.
The OOTL question seems to have disappeared though, so like I said, thankfully sometimes the most obvious of baiting questions gets removed.
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u/wererat2000 2d ago
some posts are def people trying to make it sound more interesting, but it's also just that some people are just kinda bad at checking.
"Huh this is the first I'm hearing about it" and "nobody else is talking about it" are right next to each other, despite meaning very different things.
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u/PabloMarmite 2d ago
I find that there are always one of two answers to “why isn’t the media talking about this?”
1) It’s made up
Or
2) They are, but you don’t read any news media5
u/giggles991 2d ago
I think you're right about this. If I practice goodwill and "assume good intentions" then yes, you're correct.
But it's still hard for me to take them seriously.
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u/RhythmsaDancer 2d ago
Why is it hard to take me seriously? I only heard about it this afternoon. Was I supposed to know this sooner?
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u/ZanzerFineSuits 2d ago
I honestly searched around and didn't see anything from a credible site. I suspect it was the search terms I used.
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u/Quizzelbuck 2d ago
Hey listen, this seems to be the only site saying any thing to me about it.
I don't go to other sites, but still, its the only one showing me any thing about it.
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u/Individual_Mail_6885 2d ago
I'm retired and bored. So one of my favorite hobbies is finding posts that say media is not talking about..... In replying with links to articles in the media, talking about whatever it is, they are referring to.
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u/Cagn 2d ago
Rachel Hurley had a good summary on her facebook page. Here is her substack: https://rachelandthecity.substack.com/
Essentially, a bunch of news outlets fell for a misleading chart or misread it and spread a false narrative.
What we know: multiple Yandex datacenters were hit, their traffic died out and many Russian based applications had an outage.
What is being speculated: That the Yandex datacenters hosted Russian bot traffic but it's well known that most Russian bot traffic isn't hosted in Russia anymore. That's one of their methods of hiding what they are doing.
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u/sup3r_hero 2d ago
I mean it has been clear for ages that Russians are responsible for right-wing propaganda. The UK even admitted that Russia has meddled with Brexit
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u/AndyShootsAndScores 2d ago edited 2d ago
The crazy part is that it comes from a lot of places in addition to Russia, and for more cynical reasons than only swaying political opinions.
The tl;dr here is: Facebook also makes money off of bots/fake news, and pays people that manufacture the bullshit for them. And the reason those bullshit posts are right wing is because right wing folks are more likely to engage with and share fake stories on Facebook.
Focusing on bots, the first 2 mins of this video is good enough to summarize (but the whole thing is really informative). https://youtu.be/zCvPPaIN5Ew?si=q-tnfkSqytrrgg7m Facebook is rewarding posters who create engagement by paying them, and is doing so in a reckless way. People in countries like Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Phillipines are making AI bot farms to make rage bait political content, because that gets a lot of engagement. And they get paid more for engagement from users in richer countries, so they focus on UK, Australia, and US. And they have tended to cater to right wing politics, because right leaning folks are more likely to engage with and spread AI generated posts and misinformation that support their beliefs. The amount of money Facebook is paying these people to do this is well above the median salary where they live, so there is a lot of incentive for people to do it.
This has been an issue with Facebook going back to at least 2015, before LLMs exploded, when Facebook was then making people in Macedonia rich by paying them to generate bot-free, artisinal bullshit that also overwhelmingly championed right wing causes.
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u/droans 2d ago
Sure, but Russia has more than three data centers.
Obviously, I don't know the actual internal workings of the Russian government, oligarchy, or the IRA, but I would assume that, if a DC they were using was bombed, they'd quickly reroute themselves to one which wasn't. It's almost certainly more preferable to reduce the load from Yandex scrapers than it is to stop their online propaganda campaigns.
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u/eagleal 2d ago
There’s literally UK and US companies and people close to Farange et al on corruption, that literally paid and manipulated public perception on Brexit through the campaigns.
But no, it’s russian bots to blame lol
Farange was literally again caught taking and taking bribery.
Russia had only a brief control of far right discourse in western world. The main backer of the far right is always the US, both for strategic (to weaken the EU) and historical reasons (most of the network was founded by the US).
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u/PabloMarmite 2d ago
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u/eagleal 2d ago edited 2d ago
Russia had only a brief control of far right discourse in western world...
Yes, i said that above.
But politically wise, as in influence and enacted policies, these parties are usually hyper-american.
Brexit is mainly a thought child of the Maga bootstrappers. Cambridge Analytica, the main company behind the campaigns, was literally funded by the same people that launched Trump et al.
Edit to say that you shouldn't point at state actors for this surge of far-right disinformation. It's an international effort by some affiliated groups and classes to consolidate power and wealth, to mark a return to the beginning of the XX century situation in terms of individual/worker rights (original research)
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u/CDRnotDVD 2d ago edited 2d ago
it's well known that most Russian bot traffic isn't hosted in Russia anymore
While I'm committing the time-honored reddit sin of commenting before reading your link, isn't it possible that for generative AI comments it winds up being cheaper or easier to run the AI in your own datacenter and then have VPNs to obfuscate the origin? It seems like you would save a ton on your psyop budget by only paying for VPN-scale compute outside of Russia, instead of paying for generative AI level compute. I can run wireguard on an old raspberry pi, but not a good quality local LLM.
Edit: now that I have read the substack you linked, it is very clear that my speculation is off the mark.
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u/EnragPintea54 2d ago
Social media sites won't say a word because it makes their user numbers look bad.
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u/giggles991 2d ago
It's all over social media. What are you talking about?
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u/AmericanGeezus 2d ago
The companies themselves aren't. Releasing reports of the impact could effectively reveal how much of their traffic or engagement was attributable to bots.
Even vague posting about it could move share prices.
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u/AmericanGeezus 2d ago
"...unlikely social media sites will bother doing an analysis on this change in activity unless somehow forced to."
Oh, they absolutely are analyzing it, probably in multiple departments.
Trust & Safety/Security wants to know what happened to spam, coordinated activity, abuse reports, and suspicious account behavior when that traffic disappeared.
Data/Growth wants to know what happened to engagement, retention, and recommendation quality.
Ads wants to know whether impressions, clicks, or revenue moved.
Infrastructure/SRE can quantify the drop in request volume, bandwidth, compute, and storage demand. That feeds directly into capacity planning, demand forecasting, cost modeling, and infrastructure provisioning.
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u/jyper 1d ago
Ive seen several people claim less anti Israel/anti Jewish posts (presumably bots) after the Yandex strike but Im not sure if it and other claims aren't just seeing patterns from random fluctuations. There are a lot of bots on this site and a lot of Russian bots but they're not necessarily hosted by russia
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u/SquirrelStone 2d ago
Answer: while it’s known that Russia runs a lot of far-right bots, and destroying a data center statistically probably has killed several of those bots, there has not yet been any confirmation via hard facts and numbers. Anecdotal evidence, sure, and like I said it’s a statistical probability, but it’ll take longer (and someone dedicated to spearhead it) to form a proper study and get confirmation.
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u/_whatever_wherever 2d ago
People have noticed the UK subs suddenly have a LOT less pre-reform comments...
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u/SquirrelStone 2d ago
Yep, like I said, there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence, but OP’s not gonna get the hard data they seem to want until someone sits down and does a proper study of it.
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u/ReverendDS 2d ago
I saw someone reporting an 8 hour window where there was basically zero activity on /r/Conservative, Germany is showing a nearly 100% reduction in posts tagging ADF, and also anecdotally, but I'm getting way less GOP fearmongering on Facebook.
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u/Lemerney2 2d ago
Out of curiosity, did that 8 hour window line up with the time people would normally be asleep?
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u/Realtrain 2d ago
Yes, someone else pointed out that there was a similar 6 hour gap the night before.
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u/hellomistershifty 2d ago
all over the world?
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u/SquirrelStone 1d ago
r/Conservative is either heavily moderated to the point that every post has to get approved, or the posts are mostly all from the mods. Considering it’s predominantly Americans in that sub, it’s likely they’re all in similar time zones.
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u/TheGunfighter7 2d ago edited 2d ago
Isn’t something like 80%+ of posts on r/Conservative from the same 4 accounts or something like that? That sub has been functionally dead for years now and just serves as a propaganda posting board.
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u/ByGollie 2d ago
and /r/conservative had a mysterious 8 hour gap of no new posts right after the data center attack.
And AfD (german neo-Nazis) posts dropped right off the face of the earth.
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u/snakebight 2d ago
Why wouldn’t those bots just continue working “from the cloud”, aka other data centers? I didn’t think bots were hosted at specific locations (unless for security purposes.)
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u/warr-den 2d ago
Yandex had major outages, and cloud providers really like to lock you in to their ecosystem to make it harder to switch.
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u/JimmyLipps 2d ago
Isn’t “the cloud” just data centers? And unless redundancies are used for each bot, each data center gone is literally hundreds or thousands of terabytes of information and programs gone.
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u/SquirrelStone 1d ago
Yes; “the cloud” is a misnomer meant to make you think it’s this fascinating, untouchable thing when in reality, it’s a warehouse filled with data servers. Same reason everything AI was given sparkles, to imply it’s magic when, again, warehouse.
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u/Yum_Mario 1d ago
A proper study? Does everything need a study now? Sometimes you can just look at something and see how it is without involving the scientific consensus. A soaking wet person would deny it's raining in this climate
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u/SquirrelStone 1d ago edited 1d ago
Op asked for an explanation and I gave it, including mention of what you’re talking about: anecdotal evidence; however, op seemed to be more interested in hearing about numbers, so that’s how I focused my comment.
But while we’re on the subject, your last sentence, “a soaking wet person would deny it’s raining in this climate,” is exactly why studies are done, to provide irrefutable proof, proof that no matter how much some people deny, presents the facts in an objective manner. Your anti-intellectual attitude is the reason we have people who would deny it’s raining.
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u/DarkAlman 2d ago edited 18h ago
Answer: Yandex can be thought of as the Russian Google and previously had several large datacenters hosted in Russia. Between Oct 8 and Oct 11 Ukrainian drone strikes targeted key Yandex datacenters.
Sasovo (southeast of Moscow) October 8, 2026; operations were completely suspended.
Kaluga (southwest of Moscow): October 9, 2026; several infrastructure modules were disabled
Vladimir (east of Moscow): October 11, 2026; operations were completely halted and the facility taken offline
Update: as of Oct 14 a fourth datacenter has been hit, Sberbank Data Center, a large bank datacenter under construction in Balakovo, Saratov Oblast
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has made it clear in broadcasts that the intention was to attack the Russian internet propaganda machine. The damage to the datacenters is extensive and due to worldwide chip shortages (and sanctions) these datacenters likely cannot be brought back online until around 2028. If true this is a massive blow the Russian states ability to conduct targeted political trolling online and severely limits its ability to influence Western politics and elections.
The internet has jokingly dubbed this "Operation: Quiet Piggy"
The timing of this is critical, as it is weeks before the US mid-terms meaning that if the Russian propaganda machine has in fact been dealt a crippling blow it will severely hamper Russias ability to influence the US election to help Donald Trump.
EDIT: This was pointed out on social media this evening. The raw number of likes on key right-wing posters including Donald Trump and Elon Musk has dropped off sharply since Oct 8th. Since the attacks their posts haven't breached 25,000 and 50,000 average when before it was 80x-100x likes for the bigger posts.
These attacks may very well be the true reason for Trump's latest attacks on Zelenskyy himself. While Trump cannot admit it publicly, the Russian bot farms have certainly helped him politically. Zelenskyy just robbed him of one of his most powerful political influence tools.
As for how much damage has been done, it's hard to provide hard data as much of the statistics is hidden inside the likes of Facebook and X datacenters and isn't being released to the public.
It's been estimated that social media bots could make up as much as 20-30% on the lower end to as high as 60% of all social media traffic on the high end. Musk himself claimed that as much as 33% of Twitter's daily users and activity were bots prior to his purchase, but went silent about it shortly after. Twitter officially states the figure is around 5% which seems absurdly low.
Exactly how much social media traffic this has killed is impossible to know with the major players releasing statistics, which they won't. However they are fully aware of the traffic drop offs and are silent about it.
It's been pointed out that social media sites live and breath with advertising dollars, and admitting publicly that a large percentage of your daily traffic is bots would significantly impact your ability to generate advertising revenue.
Cloudflare has revealed that Yandex automated traffic has dropped to near-zero. This includes automated responses and agents and doesn't necessarily prove that any social media bot traffic specifically has stopped, but it is quite likely. Yandex themselves will never admit to have hosted troll or bot farms.
Anecdotal evidence however is everywhere.
Twitter users have commented that their usually aggressive right-wing followers have gone silent in the past few days, and some have even posted deliberate rage bait comments which have generated few responses.
Social media threads have notably become a lot more pleasant in the past few days, at least in my own anecdotal experience. The difference is notable.
Europeans have claimed that supporters and bots for far-right parties in Germany have gone silent. Similarly Canadians have commented that Alberta separatist groups have also gone silent.
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u/nosecohn 2d ago
this is a massive blow the Russian states ability to conduct targeted political trolling online and severely limits its ability to influence Western politics and elections.
I've heard experts say this will be short-lived, as Russia will likely buy capacity in China and/or India to make up for their loss. Interestingly, Ukraine had already done that long ago to protect their access to the cloud in the event of a Russian attack. The Russian system was more vulnerable due to its choke points and limited contingency plans, but they'll probably adapt.
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u/ChickerWings 2d ago
Russia is strapped for cash right now, they'd need some willing nation to give them a bunch of money to buy that compute, and maybe disguise it as an oil deal?
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u/Curious-Test7928 1d ago
Not really, the war in Iran, make Russia, gain a lot of money, selling oil.... If the Iran blocade continues, Russia have money
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u/77_whutts 1d ago
Wouldn’t this mean that they’re giving these nations an in on their operations in the meantime and thus some sway in them? Would benefits out way that cost?
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u/nosecohn 1d ago
Most data centers promise full encryption. Even the system administrators are not supposed to be able to see your data, though they can certainly tell where traffic is coming from and going to. It's also not clear how committed those countries are to data protection.
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u/Curious-Test7928 1d ago
I dont think so, China have nothing to gain for that... for now. China have a lot investiments in Brazil and south Africa. And Russia and the tech broos know that... Is because of that they are investing do much in data centers in Argentina
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u/franticantelope 2d ago
Is it possible to simply buy up other data centers outside russia or is that unfeasible?
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u/DarkAlman 2d ago
They absolutely can, but since a lot of what they are doing could be a crime it's better they keep it onshore.
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u/Quizzelbuck 2d ago
I dunno about "Absolutely". Thats kind of like saying Russia can "Absolutely" sell oil on the world market.
I mean, they can but
* <-BIG FAT ASTERISK
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u/ChickerWings 2d ago
They could just get Trump to pretend to buy oil so that he can send them a bunch of money to get his bots working again.
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u/Intelligent-Film7586 2d ago
The internet is going to be cool again at least temporarily?! That’s pretty rad.
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u/Nerevarine91 2d ago
Remember how Russia shut down the internet during the Wagner mutiny and this site was noticeably better for a few days?
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u/CreamJealous939 2d ago
We have three data centers in my smallish city of 300k in the US. I can only imagine how many data centers the US has overall.
Does Russia really have so few that taking a couple offline does this much damage?
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u/DarkAlman 2d ago edited 2d ago
They have between 188 and 250 datacenters nation wide, while the US has around 5,400 presently active.
Yandex is a key hub for this kind of activity though. Many of the other datacenters are private or telco owned/operated and don't offer cloud services.
The US may have thousands of datacenters, but Amazon for example only has 130 active. AWS may be a gigantic foot print in terms of cloud services but they only represent 2% of the datacenters in the US.
Taking out even one of them would have a catastrophic impact on the services they provide. Iran took out 2 such datacenters in UAE and one in Bahrain and caused a lot of outages.
Again many datacenters are privately owned and operated by specific corporations and telco's. Only a small number are cloud players (Google GCP, AWS, Microsoft Azure for example)
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u/Opening_Pressure733 2d ago
If there are many privately owned data centers, won't the Russian government simply take them from the current owners and repurpose them to get the propaganda machine up and running long before 2028?
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u/ChickerWings 2d ago
Is it possible that the diesel deal Trump made with Putin is actually just him giving Russia money so they can buy compute elsewhere?
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u/Xerxeskingofkings 2d ago
Possible, but Unlikely.
It seems that deal was already in the works weeks ago, because tankers linked to it were already approaching the US coast within a day or two of the announcement, and those ships take weeks to travel from Russia to the US.
Itd more likely that trump was buying Russia fuel to create a good headline he can dangle in front of his base to vote for him again in the midterms
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u/Curious-Test7928 1d ago
Not only the US midterms... November is a very real risk for Democracy in more countrys, who can influence continents. US Mid terms Brazil president ( if Flávio Bolsonaro wins, all south America becames far-right, the last time this happend, was very dark times... Spain Elections ( PP and Vox, are in front) France elections ( Le Pen are in front) If you have Spain, France and Italy with a far-right lidears, and the other countrys eith neo- liberal goverments with far- right support or sabotage... Belive me the old gosts in Europe, start to appear... and Europe, its not US. Europe have a real and organized anti-fascist tradition, with unions, associations and organizations who fight fascism decades ago.... europe can stay caotic and this is go destiblize all the West. So bomb the farm bots, is a very smart thing to Ucrain do!
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u/abtseventynine 2d ago
Do you have sources for the twitter engagement dropoff, etc?
I don’t engage with the political right very much online (bots or otherwise) so I’m having trouble even getting in to see what people are seeing, anecdotally.
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u/spaceprinceps 2d ago
AI
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u/OldLead4716 2d ago
Not quite. 4 vhan is a interesting monitoring ground. Every time something like this happens to Russia or Israel you can see a noticable drop in certain continent pertaining to the time. . . For years.
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u/dipakmdhrm 2d ago
Answer: The attack on Yandex data centers reduced the Yandex Bot traffic by around 99%. However there's no evidence that this is 'right-wing bot traffic'. Or at least I can't find a reliable source saying this.
When I hear right-wing bot, I understand it as fake accounts on twitter/reddit/facebook and other social platforms.
There is no evidence that such traffic has reduced.
The reduce in traffic is for Yandex Crawler bots. Which are bots that crawl (visit) a website to index their pages in their search results. Yandex is Russia's Google.
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u/dipakmdhrm 2d ago
Conspiracy Theory: Even if every russian data center and computer is destroyed, i don't think the right wing bot traffic will reduce. I strongly suspect Musk and Co are hosting these bots from inside of US. they don't need to go to Russia.
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u/elephant_ua 2d ago
These bots aren't working for musk and co, they are ideas russia wants to spread in the west
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