this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2026
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598
European far-right parties see drop in social media engagement as Ukrainian strikes on Russian data centers eliminated Russian-hosted bot accounts (www.thelondoneconomic.com)
submitted 1 week ago by tardigrade@scribe.disroot.org to c/europe@feddit.org
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cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/11858823

...

Over the weekend, Ukraine carried out a co-ordinated drone strike against several major Russian data centres. This completely decimated Russia's Yandex, ... which controls more than 70% of search traffic in the country, and has reportedly resulted in a dramatic fall in bot traffic from the Yandex network.

As per the bot analysts at Tom’s Hardware, bot traffic from the Yandex network has dropped to just 0.4% of the maximum number of HTTP requests recorded in the past two weeks. That means activity from automated, Russian-hosted accounts has been virtually eliminated on social media.

...

As a result, the social media engagement on posts from [far-right] Reform UK figures appears to have dropped in the wake of Ukrainian strikes on Russian data centres.

...

There has already been a strong and significant impact on bot traffic in countries such as France and Germany.

David Colon, a French information operations researcher, has noted a huge difference in the performance of narratives generated by the Russia-linked information operations group, Storm-1516.

The silencing of the bots also appears to have caused a dramatic drop in activity around Germany's far-right AfD..

...

Amongst others, the article is citing Britain's Reform politician Richard Tice. Three posts on X from the Reform deputy leader to his almost 400,000 followers on Monday, 11 October [hadn't] hit triple figures for reposts or comments, with one not even reaching 10,000 views ... Before the Ukrainian strikes on the Russia data centres, Tice’s posts got considerably more engagement, consistently hitting triple figures for comments and reposts, whilst racking up hundreds of thousands of views.

...

A similar pattern can be seen when it comes to other far-right figures such as Nigel Farage [the linked article is given evidence about that].

...

As Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky himself said after the strikes on Russian data centres, it’s suddenly become a “little easier to breathe” on social media.

...

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[–] CharlesDarwin1809@piefed.world 0 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

I guess I see Ukraine as the "lesser evil" by far:

I've noticed that tankies like to point out that far-right figures exist in Ukraine. Yes they do. But they exist in Russia too. In fact, some Russian far-right figures have influence over the Russian government. Perhaps that's why Russia is pursuing an imperialist foreign policy.

Edit: I just want to point out that I'm not saying the Ukrainian people or the Russian people are worse or better than the other side. I'm only talking about their governments. To me the current Ukrainian government seems like the "lesser evil" compared to the current Russian government.

[–] lemmur420@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 week ago

Yeah that's fair, you won't be seeing be defending the Russian government and in fact I agree with most of this. I just wanted to point out common hypocrisy I see in online spaces where a different, zero tolerance standard is applied when it comes to foreign policy

[–] Emopunker@feddit.org 1 points 1 week ago

Btw, nonconfrontational was banned for ban evasion. I permabanned their first account for trolling, toxicity and genocide denial and they decided to make another account with exactly the same name report someone they disagreed with probably thinking I wouldnt remember them or something.