Did Ukraine Just Bomb the Russian Bots?
What this video is
⚡ a 36-minute video, readable in 60 secondsA viral chart claiming Ukrainian drone strikes crashed Germany's AfD party turned out to be an AI-generated fabrication with doctored axes and future-dated data, debunked by multiple fact-checkers. Underneath it is a real story: Ukraine did strike Russian data centers run by Yandex and Sberbank, causing real disruption and an 11% drop in Yandex's share price, but the mysterious bot-traffic collapse everyone pointed to was mostly just Yandex's own search crawlers going offline, not a political bot army dying. The piece widens into bot farms and botnets more broadly, from a $99 million Chinese-run botnet to a Russian state bot farm to Sri Lankan rage-bait content mills, and into research showing ordinary human 'supersharers,' not bots, drive most fake-news spread online. It matters because it shows how a convincing fake data visualization can outrun careful reporting, while the real mechanics of disinformation are more mundane and human than viral claims suggest.
[00:00] A European Parliament member posted a viral chart claiming German AfD online activity collapsed right after Ukrainian drones hit Russian data centers
Key takeaways
- [00:14] The chart was viewed over 4 million times and included data for three days that hadn't happened yet
- [01:03] DW's fact checkers found the chart cited no data source, no platform, no defined metric, and never even named the AfD
- [01:29] The chart's axes were manipulated, with an uneven Y-axis gap exaggerating the decline and unequal X-axis spacing for equal time periods
- [01:45] The chart was traced to a Threads account posing as a 24-year-old flight attendant, and the original post was marked as AI-generated content
+ 26 more takeaways
- [01:50] A Polisphere researcher said monitoring across 10,000 social media accounts found no statistically significant activity decline in German-speaking countries
- [01:52] The original poster, known as Wolski, apologized for unwittingly spreading an AI-generated fake that reached millions
- [03:08] Real Ukrainian drone strikes hit Yandex data centers on October 8 (Sasovo/Ryazan, reportedly housing AI training supercomputers), October 9 (Kaluga), and October 11 (Vladimir)
- [03:35] Euronews calculated that automated traffic from Yandex's network actually dropped by about 94% after the strikes
- [04:28] Cloudflare found the traffic collapse was almost entirely Yandex's own search crawlers, while malicious bot activity simply migrated to other hosting providers rather than vanishing
- [04:43] Yandex's entire search network only ever accounted for about 0.05% of the world's bot traffic
- [05:48] Ukrainian drones also struck a Sberbank data center in Balakovo, though Sberbank said services operated normally
- [07:44] Putin's 2014 law requiring Russian citizens' data be stored on domestic servers set up the vulnerability that let a few strikes cause outsized damage
- [09:12] Yandex's shares fell about 11% during the strikes despite roughly half its major data centers being knocked out
- [09:24] The cloud business that was actually hit made up only about 4% of Yandex's total revenue, per T-Journal
- [10:06] Yandex's potential losses could reach as high as 4 billion rubles a day if every service went down everywhere at once, according to ComNews CEO Leonid Konik
- [13:46] When Iran struck Amazon's data centers in the Middle East this spring, customer data in the UAE and Bahrain was permanently lost
- [16:24] In May 2024 the US Justice Department dismantled the 911 S5 botnet, which the FBI called likely the largest botnet ever
- [16:58] The alleged 911 S5 administrator made about $99 million, faced forfeiture of a Ferrari, a Rolls-Royce and 21 properties, and a maximum 65-year prison sentence
- [18:10] Europol's SIMCARTEL raid in Latvia seized 1,200 devices holding 40,000 active SIM cards that had powered 49 million fake accounts
- [19:40] In July 2024 the DOJ shut down a Russian bot farm of nearly 1,000 accounts built with an AI tool called Meliorator, run by RT and the FSB
- [22:12] A 2019 Oxford Internet Institute report found organized social media manipulation in 70 countries, with 25 governments hiring private 'computational propaganda' firms
- [24:22] ISD and The Bureau of Investigative Journalism found a 100-plus page Facebook network run from Sri Lanka with 1.6 million followers posting AI-generated anti-migrant content
- [25:04] A Pakistani YouTuber said 1,000 views from a US, UK or Canadian audience pays 15 to 75 times more than the same views from a Pakistani audience
- [29:15] A 2018 MIT study of 126,000 Twitter stories found false news was 70% more likely to be retweeted than true stories, which took six times longer to reach 1,500 people
- [30:13] A 2024 Science study found just 2,107 'supersharers' among over 660,000 tracked voters accounted for 80% of all fake news shared
- [31:23] A single Chicago Tribune article questioning the COVID vaccine was seen by more than 50 million people on Facebook, over six times the views of all flagged misinformation combined
- [34:16] Researchers cited the real-world Kimwolf botnet, which infected over 2 million devices, as a scale reference for a hypothetical AI-powered botnet swarm
- A Bloomberg terminal costs around $30,000 a year.
- The Justice Department said that customers of 911 S5 could pick IP addresses to make it look as though they were posting from a particular location, so somewhere in Ohio there may be a $55 Android TV box under a television streaming footbal
- A Pakistani YouTuber told Kristof that a thousand views from a Pakistani audience earn a creator around 40 cents, while a thousand views from the US, the UK or Canada earn between $6 and $30.
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