Despite multiple Ukrainian strikes hitting Yandex servers in Russia, a thread by antibot4navalny, which has long tracked state-sponsored social media campaigns and troll farms, explains that the Cloudflare “Bot Traffic” chart many people have cited is really about automated web crawlers operated by Yandex accessing the web.
It’s not connected to “bots” posting on social media, and Russian bot/crawler traffic overall continues to be about the same as normal. Still, are you noticing any difference in the posts and comments you’ve seen online?
[Media: https://bsky.app/profile/antibot4navalny.bsky.social/post/3mxmv7t6nxc27]
Honestly Russia might not need to bot anymore, but with a few bribed content creators and some incendiary alternative takes and a lot of bot accounts you can do a lot of damage.
The point isn’t to astroturf the internet, it’s to guide it in the right direction for people to harbor conspiratorial bullshit like that. It’s like pushing a ball down a slope lightly, the gravity at some point adds way more force than you could have.