Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's claims that last weekend's attacks on Russia's Yandex data centres led to a drop in Pro-Russian bot operations is causing debate.
The situation highlights the need to differentiate between bots, social media trolls and sophisticated influence operations, experts say.
Prof Olga Belogolova, director of the emerging technologies initiative at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, wrote a long LinkedIn post to try to give context.
Prof Belogolova, who previously led policy at Meta against influence operations, said that too many people saw "what they wanted to see" with data from network and cloud infrastructure company Cloudflare.
"The story went viral when people started sharing a Cloudflare screenshot as proof of the silenced troll farms, as it showed a severe drop in bot traffic," she said.
"Their motivated reasoning made them see that the internet was cleaner, more friendly, less toxic.
"As someone who investigated and disrupted numerous malign influence operations and troll networks, I can also tell you that they do not often host their infrastructure on Yandex."
Prof Belogolova also said that far too many people were confusing and misusing tech terminology.
"Bots are importantly not trolls ... as many tech researchers have already pointed out, Cloudflare labels any non-browser, automated script as a bot," she said.
She said that when a data centre is taken offline, "its automated web-crawling and indexing traffic cuts out too".
Cloudflare Radar, a branch of the company, agreed that nuance was needed when looking at internet traffic data.
"Bot traffic refers to automated requests to websites on Cloudflare's network, such as crawlers and scripts, not necessarily activity on social media platforms," a post from Cloudflare Radar read, casting doubt on claims that Russia's social media trolls and disinformation campaign had been disrupted.
On Thursday, Cloudflare provided more clarity on the Ukrainian attacks on Russian data centres.
"Cloudflare data reveals that while search crawling stopped, malicious bots simply migrated to other networks," the company posted.
"There was no evidence that the strikes knocked social media manipulation offline or otherwise disrupted malicious activity on the internet."
When strikes hit Yandex data centers, many assumed Russian bot operations went dark. Cloudflare data reveals that while search crawling stopped, malicious bots simply migrated to other networks. https://t.co/TiuaOjqlDf
— Cloudflare (@Cloudflare) October 14, 2026
Yet Prof Belogolova said that there were probably still ramifications faced by Russia after the data centre strikes.
"Kinetic strikes on Russian tech infrastructure may disrupt Russia's digital economy and cloud services," she said. "They are not exactly a precise tool for stopping foreign influence operations."