Y’all, I hate to rain on the dead bot parade, but the Yandex data center destruction doesn’t seem to have significantly impacted social media bots. I made temporal graphs of X posts about AfD around the time of the attack and there’s no sign of a sudden dip or residual impact on that conversation. I could be wrong, and I’m happy to read other analyses or look at other data. I can run analyses on other conversations (on X). But I’m just not seeing it. Here’s X posts by hour for posts containing “AfD” from Oct 5 thru Oct 13. Time is in Pacific. My understanding is that first impact would be around 2:30pm PDT on Oct 7, and second 6-8pm PDT on Oct 10. I don’t see any significant decrease in X traffic around these times or during this period at all.
Here’s X posts by minute for posts containing “AfD” on October 7. No sign of a rapid drop in X posts around 2:30pm PDT. Just a normal daily pattern as far as I can tell.
And here’s X posts by minute for posts containing “AfD” on October 10. No sign of a rapid drop in X posts that day or anything weird between 6-8pm PDT. Just a normal daily pattern.
The overall signal is low on Oct 10 between 6-8pm but the multi-day pattern suggests that isn’t unusual, and the conversation rises again the next day. Is there a temporary dip on the morning of the 11th? Maybe? But there’s no sharp drop and things return to normal quickly. motherjones.com
www.motherjones.com
Is there a small impact? That’s totally possible. But the stories of a massive silencing of Russian bots making a qualitative difference on social media discourse… are very likely to have been (significantly) overstated.