Did Ukrainian drone strikes really silence Russia's social media bots? (No) A real Cloudflare chart fueled a viral story ab MAGA and AfD accounts going quiet. But the evidence doesn't support the rumor. I wrote about bots, vibes, & what we've lost as platforms have shut down tools & data access.

Voting rights groups are suing Texas after the state failed to process more than 500,000 voter registration applications submitted through the Texas Department of Public Safety’s web portal.

It's accepted that there are troll/bot accounts creating fake engagement on X, Facebook etc. but the accounts themselves reside on the servers of Meta, X, etc. Orchestration of fake accounts can therefore be done anywhere connected to the internet, and it's not difficult to relocate such a workload

Sure. I’m not saying that there’s no signal there, but there’s no strong signal. Additionally, there’s now media coverage & commentary explaining how social bots just don’t work that way (X accounts don’t live on a server in Russia) and the original amplifier of this rumor has retracted & apologized

Yes, that's why we chose that term. It's a rough analysis, but it aligns with a bunch of other analyses, new info about the initial graph, and an apology from the guy who popularized the original claim. All converging on the understanding that any effect on social media info ops was super small.

Notably, Jarosław Wolski, the Polish political scientist who was a primary source of the AfD social media bot claim, has now retracted his statement and apologised (more of this, please!). German journalists have also confirmed the graph was fake and AI-generated.

They’re in Europe, sleeping. (It’s US Pacific time, where I grabbed my data.)

Is there a small impact? That’s totally possible. But the stories of a massive silencing of Russian bots making a qualitative difference on social media discourse… are very likely to have been (significantly) overstated.

Could be. Maybe for non-centralized platforms, there could be some hosting of accounts in Russian data centers. For Meta and X and other centralized platforms, it doesn’t make sense (to me) how social bots would be affected.

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Traffic volume from yandex web crawler machines went down (a webcrawler is usually lower priority workload as it is mostly refreshing pages ). Web crawler are referred to as bots. Nothing to do with social media posts.

Is there a temporary dip on the morning of the 11th? Maybe? But there’s no sharp drop and things return to normal quickly.

The overall signal is low on Oct 10 between 6-8pm but the multi-day pattern suggests that isn’t unusual, and the conversation rises again the next day.

And here’s X posts by minute for posts containing “AfD” on October 10. No sign of a rapid drop in X posts that day or anything weird between 6-8pm PDT. Just a normal daily pattern.