Attacks on Yandex: Burning data centers in Russia will not cause bot failure in the AfD

A false AI-generated graphic suggesting a decline in social media bot activity supporting Germany's Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has circulated online, according to reports. The claim, which originated from statements made by Robin Schlingheider, a member of the Green Party’s municipal council, and Tomáš Zdechovský, a conservative Czech European Parliament member, has been widely shared despite lacking verifiable evidence. The alleged drop in bot traffic was linked to recent Ukrainian attacks on Russian data centers, with some media outlets such as Standard and Focus amplifying the narrative. However, this assertion does not hold up under scrutiny. According to Cloudflare, a U.S.-based cloud services provider, there has been no significant overall decrease in bot traffic within Russia. The reduction observed relates specifically to the autonomous system AS13238, part of the Yandex network, which operates search engines and cloud services. Bot traffic encompasses a wide range of automated processes, including web crawlers used by search engines, server-to-server communications, API access, and security scanning bots. These non-human activities constitute more than half of global internet traffic. Social bots, however, differ because they attempt to mimic human behavior in social networks. As a result, monitoring systems like Cloudflare may not detect them effectively. Ukraine’s strategy of targeting Russian data centers appears to have disrupted connectivity and reduced traffic from specific data centers. Within Russia, complaints about failed payment apps, mapping services, and websites dependent on Yandex infrastructure have increased. Yet these disruptions do not necessarily translate into a measurable decline in social bot activity, which remains difficult to quantify. Doubts about the validity of the circulating graphic were raised early on by users on Reddit, the account antibot4navalny on Bluesky, and Raphael Wimmer, an informatics professor at the University of Regensburg. Wimmer questioned whether the image might have been generated using artificial intelligence and asked Schlingheider for its source. Schlingheider reportedly blocked him on Threads after the inquiry. A press request from netzpolitik.org regarding the graphic’s origin has yet to receive a response from Schlingheider. The Center for Monitoring, Analysis and Strategy (CeMAS), which tracks disinformation, right-wing extremism, antisemitism, and conspiracy theories on social media, expressed skepticism about claims of declining bot activity. Its director, Josef Holnburger, noted that his organization had not detected a noticeable drop in likes and retweets from inorganic sources. He added that it might still be too early to determine the impact of recent developments.