The BBC reports:
Claims that Ukrainian strikes on Russian data centres reduced Kremlin-linked bot networks have spread widely online, but experts have told BBC Verify there is no evidence the attacks have significantly reduced them.
In fact this whole non-story has been debunked all over the place.
Drone Strikes Didn’t Take Out a Russian Bot Farm, But We Were Primed to Believe It
A viral rumor illustrates people’s hunger to make sense of the division we see online.
Danish analyst Valdemar Osted of Common Consultancy tested the claim against Facebook data from 76 AfD politicians and 136 MAGA accounts. His team compared comments on new posts with each account’s usual performance, adjusting for posting time, weekday, and each post’s age. After the strikes, AfD comment levels ranged from 8 per cent below to 5 per cent above expectations, while MAGA accounts performed between 4 and 10 per cent above expectations.
Rather than disappearing, comments on new MAGA posts totalled between 480,000 and 560,000 a day following the attacks, compared with around 370,000 in late September. Osted described the variations as ordinary fluctuations.
https://cybernews.com/news/yandex-data-centers-bot-traffic-drop/
Yandex bot traffic fell, but the troll farm story does not hold
A viral theory claiming Ukraine's strikes on Russia's Yandex data centres silenced pro-Trump bots across US social media is spreading faster than the evidence supports, as fact-checkers warn the Cloudflare figures behind 'Operation Quiet Piggy' measure something entirely different.
It seems clear that a load of other 'bots' were responsible for peddling this particular nonsense including the Mekon (Merz).
The chancellor spoke at the International Westphalian Peace Prize ceremony, where NATO was this year's recipient. In his speech, he described Russia as a destabilizing force for Germany and a threat to democracy.
"We will not let ourselves be divided — not by hybrid attacks, not by hate stirred up on social media by Moscow-controlled bots and not by the slogans of the AfD and their Russian backers," Merz said.