Did Ukrainian strikes on Russian datacentres reduce online disinformation?
While some viral online graphs suggest less bot activity, Zelenskyy’s claims of improved social media discourse do not entirely pass muster
TL;DR
- Ukraine conducted airstrikes on Yandex datacentres, causing damage and affecting some Russian websites.
- President Zelenskyy suggested these strikes reduced Russian disinformation, but experts largely disagree.
- The decline in activity observed was mainly from Yandex's web crawlers, not social media disinformation bots.
- Disinformation networks are distributed and resilient, making them hard to disrupt with datacentre strikes.
- Effective strategies against disinformation might involve targeting specific troll farms or working with social media companies.