Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky claimed on Monday that the country’s three strikes on Russian tech giant Yandex’s data centers last week had been a resounding success.
Zelensky told reporters that social media platforms had seen a notable drop in Russian bot activity. Following the strikes, “it suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social media platforms,” he said.
“A lot of people noticed it, and there was less hate, less division and fewer provocations because there were fewer bots,” he added. “And it’s pretty clear where those bots were coming from.”
The news once again highlights how data centers have become a major target during ongoing geopolitical conflict. Inexpensive drone attacks are hitting a nerve, setting back major AI data center expansion efforts across the Middle East as Iran targets the facilities amid hostilities with the United States.
The phenomenon may even be hitting close to home for certain billionaires. On Elon Musk’s Twitter-turned-X, users quickly noticed that the number of interactions the site’s owner was getting on his posts seemed to plummet in the wake of the strikes.
“Woah, Elon Musk out here getting less than 5k likes on his tweets after the bot farm got exploded,” YouTuber Zack “Jerry Rig Everything” Nelson tweeted. A screenshot appended to the post shows Musk receiving 4,900 likes after responding “Wow” to a racist conspiracy theory that claims Brussels, Belgium, is “only 10.5 percent white.”
On its face, the theory sounds pretty far-fetched. Could the destruction of a few Russian data centers really be tanking Musk’s engagement on his own platform?
But looking at the average number of likes his posts have been receiving does raise eyebrows. Throughout October, his posts garnered an average of between 17,000 and 81,000 likes per day — until the past two days, the averages slid to a dismal 11,000 and 8,000, respectively.
We certainly can’t determine a causal relationship, but the numbers are striking. And experts are paying attention.
An analysis by Cloudflare showed that traffic from Yandex had dropped by 99 percent last week following the strikes. Not all of the traffic was “necessarily bot behaviour on social media platforms,” the company clarified, pointing out that its figures included all automated internet requests, such as search engine crawlers or monitoring tools.
Other rumors that online activity surrounding Germany’s far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) had plummeted also circulated, but as Euronews points out, there hasn’t been any independent verification of these claims.
Amid it all, Zelensky’s office walked back the Ukrainian president’s announcement, telling the BBC that he was “talking about the atmosphere on social media” instead of a concrete fall in bot activity.
It’s an extremely volatile moment in history as the United States is headed to the polls less than a month from now for the midterm elections. The subject of Russian interference, particularly during the 2016 presidential elections, has fueled plenty of heated discussion over the years. And Musk, one of president Donald Trump’s biggest supporters, has turned into an influential figure in these debates, most recently accusing Zelensky of having gone “too far” by striking Russian oil refineries.
Others celebrated the latest strikes.
“As someone harassed daily by armies of Russian bots, my deepest thanks!” former US ambassador to Russia and political science professor Michael McFaul tweeted.
More on X: Elon Musk Is Such a Sad Sack That He Just Stole a Random Guy’s Joke on Twitter
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