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.
Researchers from dTeam, a US-based group that tracks Moscow-linked influence operations, told BBC Verify there has not been “any traffic change from known Russian accounts and bot clusters on any platform”.
Bots linked to pro-Kremlin influence operations like Storm-1516 and Matryoshka - both of which BBC Verify has previously reported on - were still active on social media on Tuesday, evidence shared with BBC Verify by dTeam shows.
I suspect that what’s happening here is complicated.
The strike will have taken out some bots because inevitably that’s what the server farms will have been used for, at least partially. So there will have been some drop in traffic, the majority of the right wing traffic will have come from a minority of users so the drop was significant in terms of quantity of posts, even if it wasn’t necessarily significant in terms of absolute numbers of individual accounts. But then also other accounts were less likely to post because they weren’t getting backed up and retweeted as much, because the account that did all that were the bot accounts.