Despite multiple Ukrainian strikes hitting Yandex servers in Russia, a thread by antibot4navalny, which has long tracked state-sponsored social media campaigns and troll farms, explains that the Cloudflare “Bot Traffic” chart many people have cited is really about automated web crawlers operated by Yandex accessing the web.
It’s not connected to “bots” posting on social media, and Russian bot/crawler traffic overall continues to be about the same as normal. Still, are you noticing any difference in the posts and comments you’ve seen online?
[Media: https://bsky.app/profile/antibot4navalny.bsky.social/post/3mxmv7t6nxc27]
I do agree the claim is wildly unsubstantiated but I actually don’t think it’s possible to prove really. You’d need to label the accounts, if you can’t tell which accounts are bots you just will never be able to prove it otherwise.
However VPNs exist. I don’t think Russia has the bottomless purse you’re claiming like it is vast but not bottomless there are limitations. I also think it’s actually not likely you could tell from traffic. There’s probably too many factors to judge “regular traffic” like let’s say there are 1000, 10,000, 100,000 and one million bots. Even at a million that’s a small fraction on the Internet. There’s probably a fluctuation of millions of users a day on most sites. Anyone of those numbers could appear as regular everyday traffic fluctuations. It’s just not something anyone could prove and if you go off your personal experience that’s really nothing as well.
So I dunno but I think with time you’ll be able to tell more clearly.