This graph shows that Yandex Web crawler farm was hit. The other option, it was shut down to accommodate more critical services that got hit. (I worked for Yandex 20 years ago, one crawler guy was in the same room.) Not sure if troll farms got affected in any way, that is a different business entirely, no overlap.
The interesting aspect is this: Yandex was taken from its owners semi-consensually. Similarly, the original owner of the troll farms was blown up in a business jet. He staged a mutiny cause his dirty bloody business was about to be taken from him non-consensually. Some other large non-consensual takeovers unfold for 5 years, soon 6.
I don't use X myself, but my friends told me there's a noticable reduction in hateful tweets, at least in the Polish sphere. Much less comments blaming Ukrainians for everything wrong with the world.
Either Ukraine was aiming exactly for that or it is just a coincidence and Ukraine is going to exploit it further because reducing Russian bot activity will reduce visibility for parties which are openly hostile to Ukraine (like AfD) which reduces their ability to get into power.
It’s also possible the US and UK gave targeting information or helped Ukraine with site selection. It’s not like we don’t know where this stuff is coming from.
Maybe, but also, they just hit a few of the largest data centers. Russia simply does not have that many large data centers and it's not so much of a secret where they are located I guess. Such an attack disrupts a lot of things and it's natural that the Russians focus their recovery efforts and the spare capacity they have left elsewhere on more critical services.
Just this week Trump was threatening to cut off intelligence if Ukraine continued targeting Russian oil refineries. This implies they are still receiving intelligence.
One of the reasons we need to better relate social media companies, is so we can get at this data. Twitter was incredibly open, pre-Musk. If you're running a platform like that, you're a publisher, and should be required to provide API access for accountability and transparency purposes.
With some analysis, it might be possible to figure out which accounts were Russian trolls by comparing tweet frequency with the timing of these bombings.
There's of course the obvious, low effort trolling, but I'd think there are also more subtle, maybe more intellectually equipped information warfare going on.
German here. I wish. AfD polls highest out of all parties, based on several independent polling organizations. [1] It's not plausible that online support evaporates over night.
I hate Russia with a passion and strongly support Ukraine, but this kind of convenient narrative always makes me suspicious. (I use Twitter daily and haven't necessarily noticed anything.)
Reminds me of when 4channers said 4chan's daily interracial posting went way down on October 7, 2023. (It didn't.)
I could believe this, but not before I see a good empirical analysis. Until then, it just feels like typical folk gossip.
No, I know. That doesn't necessarily mean these Yandex data centers being hit affected that yesterday and today, though. For a variety of different possible reasons.
All I can say is that vile comments usually there on certain pages dealing with the war in Ukraine have almost all disappeared under some of the FB feeds I read.
Seconded. The amount of "someone who claims to be on my side has a bad view, must be a bot!" is absurd.
People have been problematic since recorded time, and the whole "well X% of internet traffic is bots!" doesn't mean the % you're interacting with is just that.
99.99% (totally made up for example) of the emails I am probably sent are spam, those are filtered automatically before I even see them by the various email providers, and of the remaining .01% some still slips through.
I feel that there's somewhat of a similar disconnect between "x amount of traffic is bots" and people assuming that means that supposed ally who says horrible things is a bot (...or psyop..or false flag...or etc...)
I always assumed that all of those people were correct, everyone they were arguing with is a bot. What I think they overlooked is that everyone they agreeing with is a bot too.
EDMO published an analysis on the topic[0] of "independent anti-vax influencers" unrelated to Russia, suddenly pushing viewpoints that explicitly benefit Russia in a coordinated manner.
I'm not denying that Russia spreads disinformation and propaganda. They definitely do. I'm just skeptical knocking out these data centers is necessarily creating the effect people are anecdotally claiming to observe.
Is this sarcasm? You don't see a lack of something. That's what it means. To prove a reduction you have to look at aggregate statistics and sentiment analysis.
Since this submission is kind of on the topic of trolling, I miss good old fashioned forum troll comments like this. non political, not immediately obvious, cortisol provoking (7/10)
Previously we can point to data and see things like Scotland Independence accounts all go quite on mass when Iran goes offline, or the OSRS player base go down and the gold price spike when Venezuela has a blackout.
I've seen no analysis connecting Yandex's sabotage to a drop in hate speech on the English speaking internet.
You will not see any such analyses, as it is now impossible to make them.
We genuinely have nothing but vibes now, as we have like 4 social media sites that have collectively decided to severely limit their APIs or straight up kill research-focused tools (like Facebook's own CrowdTangle) around 2023-2024.
When xitter made the geolocation visibility change, one could point to a handful of accounts that pretended to be in a certain part of the world and actually where in some other. It is not statistical, but it is at least some anecdotal evidence.
Now one could just present a handful of consistently-vocal accounts that went completely silent in the last days.
I hope at least fellow IT people can recognize that "social media bots" are not running on Yandex datacenters neither they have IP adresses from Russia.
This is just not how social media botting works. If you try to "bot" facebook, instagram or any major social network via browser from datacenter IP let alone ones from Russia you'll soon get all your accounts banned.
Social media are botted via apps on mobile phones set in large farms; read: thousands of mobile devices. They either jailbroken or have some advance automation.
Neither they use Russian IP. Instead they go for residential proxies kindly provided by Israeli firms where bandwidth cost a leg, but it worth it. Or they just use their own botnets instead.
Why on earth would they host orchestrating applications in Russia? AWS, Hetzner, DigitalOcesn work just fine.
In Russia it's higher latency, way more expensive and there are lots of connectivity issues. Its not like Russia have ministry of social network botting that require to host it within country.
Reason why these bot networks are effective and hard to find is because it's not some "KGB" minister respobsibility.
Botnets, malware, botting in Russia is someone small criminal enterprises with a lot of people doing it independently. They might be affilated to government or not at all - might be they just sell services to highest bidder.
Latency is irrelevant for social media posting, Western providers might identify and suspend such an operation overnight, and no, hosting in Russia is actually a lot cheaper.
This is a great example of a headline that has two completely different meanings to two different groups.
Many are (incorrectly) interpreting 'bot traffic' to mean something like "fake users on social media that leave comments and 'likes' supporting right-wing posts". (something Russian bots were accused of during the 2016 US presidential election)
But Yandex is like Russia's Google. Both Google and Yandex need to scrape the internet in order to index (no indexing means the site would not appear in search results).
So Yandex datacenters going down meant so too did their 'bots' that visit sites to index them. Nothing to do with 'bots' as per the Russia collusion allegations a la the 2016 election.
There's a lot of ancedotes "I've seen hatespeech drop" etc. This is measurable and there are people measuring this kind of thing. Let's wait for some real data.
It is a very hard time to do this sort of study with APIs and scraping not being available to the labs that would actually want to study this.
My guess would be that there will be a significant change detected but Russian troll farms are not totally datacenter operated - it's still mostly ran by real office workers like in 1984. That being said, you still need datacenter compute for organizing even manual operations like this.
Those CF country stats are certifiably useless. They only know the last hop. We know that consumer routers and web browser extensions are vulnerable. There are plenty of ways to bounce malicious traffic through assumed-organic hosts. These are almost impossible to track, especially with the prevalence of CGNAT.
No serious person would ever claim that Russian cyber influence operations were sending traffic directly from Russian IP addresses. That's 'Get Smart' levels of absurdity. It's as ridiculous as a Russian spy pretending to be an American while speaking with a thick Russian accent.
As the other commenter said, not helpful. If you go with cf countries, Germany is one of the worst offenders. But only because it has Frankfurt as a big traffic node and lots of hosting providers.
Looking at the destruction of Yandex data centers, these days it shows how terrifying drones are as weapons.
I'm curious about how to defend against such drones.
Are kamikaze drones a method of exploding on a target after image learning?
They are nearly useless. Lasers work with the direct line-of-sight, and the most recent iteration drones can fly just a few _meters_ over the terrain. And they can approach from any direction.
So lasers or turrets can work if you want to defend a military base in the middle of a desert, but not something that can be deployed in cities.
Apparently, the most efficient method so far is interceptor drones.
> these days it shows how terrifying drones are as weapons.
They aren't fundamentally different from a bunch of assholes sitting in an airplane 25,000 feet above you, flying above the ceiling of your flak and air interceptors, dropping a few thousand tons of firebombs on your town.
> I'm curious about how to defend against such drones.
Looking at what most of their targets have in common, I'd say that there's an easy answer to that - don't start wars.
They could be dead you know. I wouldn't joke around, we're all in the same business after all. I'm sure the SRE's didn't decide who rented space in their DC.
I haven't seen this effect documented but if it isn't being documented it really needs to be. We need to get -very- mad about the soft wars being waged right now and the first step is to understand the extent of what is going on and by who. We all know that bots are driving a massive amount of engagement right now. It is rare though to see such direct causal proof of where it is coming from.
It's hard to document on the major platforms because neither X nor Meta provide easy access to streaming APIs that researchers might use to verify such claims. Last time I looked X was about $60k/year, for example.
Curious where it’s being documented - this is a fascinating study (who knows how long time period to measure its impact will last) - do you have links?
Would you mind posting at least one link? If it's actually documented across the internet, this should take you no time. A bunch of anecdotes does not count, though.
Does it not bother you it's entirely fact-free? No source, no info what exactly is on Y-Axis and provided data ends in the future at the time of the posting?
Previously discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50041619
This graph shows that Yandex Web crawler farm was hit. The other option, it was shut down to accommodate more critical services that got hit. (I worked for Yandex 20 years ago, one crawler guy was in the same room.) Not sure if troll farms got affected in any way, that is a different business entirely, no overlap.
The interesting aspect is this: Yandex was taken from its owners semi-consensually. Similarly, the original owner of the troll farms was blown up in a business jet. He staged a mutiny cause his dirty bloody business was about to be taken from him non-consensually. Some other large non-consensual takeovers unfold for 5 years, soon 6.
What an appetite!
You really should mention chef-cum-media-mogul-cum-PMC-commander Prigozhin by name.
Yevheniy Prigozhin, of Wagner PMC fame lately (and ultimately):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yevgeny_Prigozhin
> Not sure if troll farms got affected in any way, that is a different business entirely, no overlap.
Was a different business. Before the "consensual" takeover.
After the takeover, there's only one business that matters: do what they tell you.
funny that you didn’t call out Prihozin
I don't use X myself, but my friends told me there's a noticable reduction in hateful tweets, at least in the Polish sphere. Much less comments blaming Ukrainians for everything wrong with the world.
Either Ukraine was aiming exactly for that or it is just a coincidence and Ukraine is going to exploit it further because reducing Russian bot activity will reduce visibility for parties which are openly hostile to Ukraine (like AfD) which reduces their ability to get into power.
It’s also possible the US and UK gave targeting information or helped Ukraine with site selection. It’s not like we don’t know where this stuff is coming from.
US? Absolutely not
UK? Quite possibly. Given their recent admission (finally) around the Russian propaganda for Brexit
Thanks for the pointer to that Brexit story. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c6jdm3zggl0ko for anyone else who's not seen it.
US is helping with targeting and a lot of things.
Most of those drones have starlink recivers.
UK has no infra to target even their own missiles. They always had to use US!
Ukrainian drones can't use Starlink in Russia because Musk is not allowing that. So that's false.
Maybe, but also, they just hit a few of the largest data centers. Russia simply does not have that many large data centers and it's not so much of a secret where they are located I guess. Such an attack disrupts a lot of things and it's natural that the Russians focus their recovery efforts and the spare capacity they have left elsewhere on more critical services.
US seems unlikely given Trump just made a deal to give money to Russia in exchange for diesel and blamed Ukraine for gas prices.
I mean, sure, maybe some random person at the Pentagon could have done it but the US has not acted as a Ukraine ally for years now.
Just this week Trump was threatening to cut off intelligence if Ukraine continued targeting Russian oil refineries. This implies they are still receiving intelligence.
Russia attacked several Ukraine data centres recently. This was just tit for tat.
Same in Germany : AFD's activity went abruptly down apparently.
Can you link a reliable source for this? The only thing I could find online was someone claiming this with a chart that does not refer to Afd at all.
One of the reasons we need to better relate social media companies, is so we can get at this data. Twitter was incredibly open, pre-Musk. If you're running a platform like that, you're a publisher, and should be required to provide API access for accountability and transparency purposes.
As far as I can tell there is no reliable data that would indicate any of that.
With some analysis, it might be possible to figure out which accounts were Russian trolls by comparing tweet frequency with the timing of these bombings.
There's of course the obvious, low effort trolling, but I'd think there are also more subtle, maybe more intellectually equipped information warfare going on.
A German friend said support for the AfD completely evaporated. Gone.
German here. I wish. AfD polls highest out of all parties, based on several independent polling organizations. [1] It's not plausible that online support evaporates over night.
[1] https://www.dkriesel.com/_media/sonntagsfrage_wahl2025.png
I hate Russia with a passion and strongly support Ukraine, but this kind of convenient narrative always makes me suspicious. (I use Twitter daily and haven't necessarily noticed anything.)
Reminds me of when 4channers said 4chan's daily interracial posting went way down on October 7, 2023. (It didn't.)
I could believe this, but not before I see a good empirical analysis. Until then, it just feels like typical folk gossip.
Russia’s use of social media to influence western thought and sow discord is pretty well documented (even in their geopolitical texts).
Eg https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328006677_Weaponizi...
This is an easy topic to find empirical analysis.
No, I know. That doesn't necessarily mean these Yandex data centers being hit affected that yesterday and today, though. For a variety of different possible reasons.
right, so far we have yandex search crawler went offline
yet to see any evidence of anything else going down
Here's basically the most anti-Russia account on Twitter agreeing with you and me: https://x.com/P_Kallioniemi/status/2109542508682248478
Seems to likely just be a standard socially constructed folk belief
All I can say is that vile comments usually there on certain pages dealing with the war in Ukraine have almost all disappeared under some of the FB feeds I read.
Excuse the grammar.
Seconded. The amount of "someone who claims to be on my side has a bad view, must be a bot!" is absurd.
People have been problematic since recorded time, and the whole "well X% of internet traffic is bots!" doesn't mean the % you're interacting with is just that.
99.99% (totally made up for example) of the emails I am probably sent are spam, those are filtered automatically before I even see them by the various email providers, and of the remaining .01% some still slips through.
I feel that there's somewhat of a similar disconnect between "x amount of traffic is bots" and people assuming that means that supposed ally who says horrible things is a bot (...or psyop..or false flag...or etc...)
I always assumed that all of those people were correct, everyone they were arguing with is a bot. What I think they overlooked is that everyone they agreeing with is a bot too.
EDMO published an analysis on the topic[0] of "independent anti-vax influencers" unrelated to Russia, suddenly pushing viewpoints that explicitly benefit Russia in a coordinated manner.
[0] https://edmo.eu/publications/how-covid-19-conspiracy-theoris...
I'm not denying that Russia spreads disinformation and propaganda. They definitely do. I'm just skeptical knocking out these data centers is necessarily creating the effect people are anecdotally claiming to observe.
I've actually seen less controversial comments here on HN as well.
That’s on me. I’ve been commenting less.
What about true social?
For those claiming a drop in hate speech on social media, I’ve yet to see examples of this. Plenty of claims, no examples.
Is this sarcasm? You don't see a lack of something. That's what it means. To prove a reduction you have to look at aggregate statistics and sentiment analysis.
Since this submission is kind of on the topic of trolling, I miss good old fashioned forum troll comments like this. non political, not immediately obvious, cortisol provoking (7/10)
Trolling was great and being a troll was a badge of honour, before normies taking over the internet destroyed that, too.
Keith Ledger was a terrible Batman.
That's what he's asking for, but it seems Xitter becoming a walled garden has killed those old "trend" charting sites that used to exist around it.
I would like to see some evidence.
Previously we can point to data and see things like Scotland Independence accounts all go quite on mass when Iran goes offline, or the OSRS player base go down and the gold price spike when Venezuela has a blackout.
I've seen no analysis connecting Yandex's sabotage to a drop in hate speech on the English speaking internet.
You will not see any such analyses, as it is now impossible to make them.
We genuinely have nothing but vibes now, as we have like 4 social media sites that have collectively decided to severely limit their APIs or straight up kill research-focused tools (like Facebook's own CrowdTangle) around 2023-2024.
When xitter made the geolocation visibility change, one could point to a handful of accounts that pretended to be in a certain part of the world and actually where in some other. It is not statistical, but it is at least some anecdotal evidence.
Now one could just present a handful of consistently-vocal accounts that went completely silent in the last days.
What? At night I definitely see a lack of sun. He's exactly asking for statistics.
Lack of Sun is evidence for that there is no Sun?
Irrelevant. I'm sure the reply was about "you can't see the lack of something" which, by the example the other user posted, not entirely true.
I hope at least fellow IT people can recognize that "social media bots" are not running on Yandex datacenters neither they have IP adresses from Russia.
This is just not how social media botting works. If you try to "bot" facebook, instagram or any major social network via browser from datacenter IP let alone ones from Russia you'll soon get all your accounts banned.
Social media are botted via apps on mobile phones set in large farms; read: thousands of mobile devices. They either jailbroken or have some advance automation.
Neither they use Russian IP. Instead they go for residential proxies kindly provided by Israeli firms where bandwidth cost a leg, but it worth it. Or they just use their own botnets instead.
The residential proxy IPs and the mobile terminals in those farms are just the exit holes.
They don't decide what to post independently. An orchestrating application is hosted somewhere, and that somewhere is Russia.
Why on earth would they host orchestrating applications in Russia? AWS, Hetzner, DigitalOcesn work just fine.
In Russia it's higher latency, way more expensive and there are lots of connectivity issues. Its not like Russia have ministry of social network botting that require to host it within country.
Reason why these bot networks are effective and hard to find is because it's not some "KGB" minister respobsibility.
Botnets, malware, botting in Russia is someone small criminal enterprises with a lot of people doing it independently. They might be affilated to government or not at all - might be they just sell services to highest bidder.
Latency is irrelevant for social media posting, Western providers might identify and suspend such an operation overnight, and no, hosting in Russia is actually a lot cheaper.
An important detail for those, like me, who have't kept up with the news: this was drone strike against a yandex data center, not cyber attack.
Multiple drone strikes, against three different data centers.
This is a great example of a headline that has two completely different meanings to two different groups.
Many are (incorrectly) interpreting 'bot traffic' to mean something like "fake users on social media that leave comments and 'likes' supporting right-wing posts". (something Russian bots were accused of during the 2016 US presidential election)
But Yandex is like Russia's Google. Both Google and Yandex need to scrape the internet in order to index (no indexing means the site would not appear in search results).
So Yandex datacenters going down meant so too did their 'bots' that visit sites to index them. Nothing to do with 'bots' as per the Russia collusion allegations a la the 2016 election.
Exactly what I think is happening here, confusion between web crawler bots and the other sort of bots.
How do you know that?
Here is their definition of "bot": https://developers.cloudflare.com/radar/glossary/#verified-b...
He can read and think.
How do you think Cloudflare gets this bot traffic metric?
There's a lot of ancedotes "I've seen hatespeech drop" etc. This is measurable and there are people measuring this kind of thing. Let's wait for some real data.
It is a very hard time to do this sort of study with APIs and scraping not being available to the labs that would actually want to study this.
My guess would be that there will be a significant change detected but Russian troll farms are not totally datacenter operated - it's still mostly ran by real office workers like in 1984. That being said, you still need datacenter compute for organizing even manual operations like this.
I'd like to see this data too. What report would you recommend?
Well thats one way to deal with scrapers
Thanks Ukraine
Russia is a pretty shithole in many ways but the posturing of people here in a post Snowden and Epstein world is something.
Yes, russia uses both farms and attempts to influence the public opinion, but guess what.
According to Cloudflare, US still accounts for majority of the bot traffic though. https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots?dateRange=12w#bot-traffic-...
Yandex is just a drop in the ocean bud.
Those CF country stats are certifiably useless. They only know the last hop. We know that consumer routers and web browser extensions are vulnerable. There are plenty of ways to bounce malicious traffic through assumed-organic hosts. These are almost impossible to track, especially with the prevalence of CGNAT.
No serious person would ever claim that Russian cyber influence operations were sending traffic directly from Russian IP addresses. That's 'Get Smart' levels of absurdity. It's as ridiculous as a Russian spy pretending to be an American while speaking with a thick Russian accent.
As the other commenter said, not helpful. If you go with cf countries, Germany is one of the worst offenders. But only because it has Frankfurt as a big traffic node and lots of hosting providers.
This is sad to see considering Yandex seems to be the only company with a proper image search right now.
It's actually incredible how terrible google images seems in comparison. Yandex is just so, so good for reverse image search
Looking at the destruction of Yandex data centers, these days it shows how terrifying drones are as weapons. I'm curious about how to defend against such drones. Are kamikaze drones a method of exploding on a target after image learning?
I’m sure I’m wrong, but I remember reading about lasers being used as a cost effective defense mechanism
Something like https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-military-laser-shoots-down-c...
They are nearly useless. Lasers work with the direct line-of-sight, and the most recent iteration drones can fly just a few _meters_ over the terrain. And they can approach from any direction.
So lasers or turrets can work if you want to defend a military base in the middle of a desert, but not something that can be deployed in cities.
Apparently, the most efficient method so far is interceptor drones.
very thanks!
> these days it shows how terrifying drones are as weapons.
They aren't fundamentally different from a bunch of assholes sitting in an airplane 25,000 feet above you, flying above the ceiling of your flak and air interceptors, dropping a few thousand tons of firebombs on your town.
> I'm curious about how to defend against such drones.
Looking at what most of their targets have in common, I'd say that there's an easy answer to that - don't start wars.
I wonder if their SREs have a 'Drone strike' playbook.
They could be dead you know. I wouldn't joke around, we're all in the same business after all. I'm sure the SRE's didn't decide who rented space in their DC.
These DCs were built by Yandex for Yandex
They do. Yandex has been holding periodic "datacenter offline" exercises for a while.
I’m afraid it’s going to be a popular runbook if ppl don’t get their shit together quickly.
This is being documented across the internet. Pro AfD posting plummeted and pro Trump posting plummeted.
It makes me wonder whether activists should have been targeting these operations sooner. I had no idea they were so centralized.
I haven't seen this effect documented but if it isn't being documented it really needs to be. We need to get -very- mad about the soft wars being waged right now and the first step is to understand the extent of what is going on and by who. We all know that bots are driving a massive amount of engagement right now. It is rare though to see such direct causal proof of where it is coming from.
It's hard to document on the major platforms because neither X nor Meta provide easy access to streaming APIs that researchers might use to verify such claims. Last time I looked X was about $60k/year, for example.
Curious where it’s being documented - this is a fascinating study (who knows how long time period to measure its impact will last) - do you have links?
Would you mind posting at least one link? If it's actually documented across the internet, this should take you no time. A bunch of anecdotes does not count, though.
Can someone post the actual data sources for this ? I keep seeing people claim this and even post graphs, but 0 sources.
Mostly seeing charts like this where people track posting activity of certain accounts
https://bsky.app/profile/chadbourn.bsky.social/post/3mxmourr...
Does it not bother you it's entirely fact-free? No source, no info what exactly is on Y-Axis and provided data ends in the future at the time of the posting?
(and Zdechovsky is not a reliable source at all)
Source: trust me bro
Activists? You think the Russian propaganda machine can be defeated by activists?
Sure, if enough activists are involved, with sufficient skill and compute.
What's a government if not a bunch of organized activists?