Ukrainian drones set fire to three data centers belonging to Yandex, Russia’s answer to Google, between October 8 and October 11. Within hours, a story was racing across X, Instagram, and Bluesky: the strikes had knocked out the Russian bot farms behind the online hatred of Israel. Charts showed mentions of “Free Palestine” and “genocide” sliding downward. Supporters of Israel shared it as proof that the global outcry against the Jewish state was manufactured in Moscow.
The story collapsed within 48 hours. The truth behind it is more damning.
Three Strikes in Four Days
The strikes themselves were real. Ukraine hit the Yandex data center in Sasovo in the Ryazan region on October 8, a larger facility in the Kaluga region the next day, and a third center in Vladimir on October 11. Asked about the strikes, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told reporters, “We always respond in kind,” referring to Russia’s campaign against data centers in Kyiv. The outages knocked out taxi apps, banking services and cloud platforms across Russia and neighboring countries.
How the Claim Spread
The bot claim began with a Cloudflare Radar chart posted to Bluesky, showing automated traffic from the Yandex network plunging after the Vladimir strike. Tom’s Hardware ran it under a headline declaring Russian disinformation bot traffic “nearly eliminated overnight.” The London Economic, a left-leaning British site, spun the same chart in the opposite political direction, reporting that “far-right bot accounts” had fallen silent and tying it to the upcoming US midterm elections. On October 12, speaking at the Warsaw Security Forum, Zelensky himself endorsed the idea, saying “everyone noticed” the drop in Russian bot activity. According to Interfax-Ukraine, he said there was “less hatred, less discord, and fewer provocations because there were fewer bots.”
Each camp looked at the same chart and saw the other side’s army vanish.
What the Chart Really Measured
The chart measured something else entirely. RuntimeWire, a technology news site, reported that bot traffic from Yandex’s network had fallen to 0.4 percent of its two-week peak, and concluded that network-level data cannot identify disinformation operators or what they were doing. JFeed explained that the traffic which disappeared came from Yandex’s own crawlers, the automated programs a search engine uses to index the web. When the servers burned, the search crawler went dark. JFeed added that bot farms pushing propaganda route their activity through proxy servers to hide its origin, and reported that Cloudflare recorded no change in automated traffic from Russia during the past week.
UNITED24 Media, the news outlet of the Ukrainian government’s UNITED24 initiative, laid out the numbers. At 02:00 UTC on October 11, automated requests from Yandex’s network stood at 0.3 percent of the chart’s maximum, compared with 88.2 percent at the same hour a week earlier. Cloudflare classified 99.6 percent of the network’s requests for web pages over the week as automated. By the evening of October 11, according to the German tech site t3n, the traffic had already recovered to around 20 percent. Even Kyiv’s own outlet concluded that the measurements cannot establish whether Russian propaganda bots disappeared, or whether damaged infrastructure simply stopped generating ordinary automated traffic.
Ordinary users ran their own experiments. A “bot test” trend spread across X, with users posting opinions that would normally draw a swarm of automated replies and reporting that far fewer arrived, according to UNILAD Tech. The Independent, however, reported that Cloudflare saw only a small decrease in overall bot traffic. Cloudflare’s bot figures count every automated source, from search engine crawlers to programs scraping data to train artificial intelligence, and reply bots on social media make up a sliver of that.
The “Free Palestine” Charts
The “Free Palestine” charts had their own problem. Jewish Breaking News, which posted them to Instagram, acknowledged that “the screenshots count keyword mentions, not Russian bots.” The charts covered October 5 through 11, a window built around the third anniversary of the October 7 massacre. Mentions of “genocide” and “Free Palestine” surge every year around the anniversary and fall off afterward. The final day of the chart was also incomplete.
A Real Wave of Zionists
Something else was changing on X that week, far from any Russian server. The Jerusalem Post wrote its own code to analyze the platform and found 613 posts from 549 separate accounts following a single formula: “I’m not Jewish. I’m [nationality or faith]. And I am a Zionist.” The trend barely registered at first, with 26 posts on October 8. It jumped to 131 on October 9, the day after the first Yandex strike, and to 270 on October 10. About 88 percent of the posts appeared after October 9. The posters identified themselves as Iranian, Nigerian, Japanese, Irish, Polish, and Dutch, and as Christians, Muslims, Hindus, and atheists. Most accounts posted only once, and the Post found no evidence of central coordination. For users who felt their feeds had changed, part of what they saw was a wave of real people standing up for Israel.
Reports From France, Poland, and Israel
One researcher offered a narrower observation worth noting. David Colon, a French specialist in information warfare, tracks Storm-1516, a Russian operation that manufactures fake news stories. Colon reported on X that a Storm-1516 fake aimed at the French presidential campaign, posted October 9, drew only a few dozen views, a fraction of what the network’s earlier fabrications achieved. His finding concerns one Russian network targeting French politics, and it says nothing about anti-Israel content.
The claims reached Israel as well. Kyiv Post reported that commentators in Poland and Israel described fewer inflammatory accounts after the strikes. Former Ukrainian lawmaker Borislav Bereza, citing Israeli observers, reported that accounts posting aggressive political comments in Russian and Hebrew had gone quiet. Polish military commentator Jarosław Wolski declared a “de-Russified internet” and posted a graph claiming a 56 percent drop in online support for Germany’s far-right AfD party. Kyiv Post noted that the graph identified no data source or account sample.
The timing gives those reports weight in Israel, which goes to the polls on October 27. Ynet reported that the Shin Bet has set up a dedicated election-security team, with foreign cyber operations and political bots among the threats it is tracking.
The Real Bot Army
The Yandex story failed, and the bot army it described is real. The evidence comes from researchers who measured it.
In the days after October 7, 2023, the Tel Aviv-based threat intelligence firm Cyabra analyzed more than 162,000 profiles taking part in online conversations about the Hamas massacre. More than 40,000 of them were fake. Those accounts pumped out over 312,000 pro-Hamas posts and comments, some posting hundreds of times a day. “Across the social media platforms, 25% of the profiles engaged in this conversation were fake accounts,” Cyabra’s Rafi Mendelsohn told Fox Business. Many of the accounts had been created well before the attack and sat dormant until Hamas terrorists crossed the border, then sprang to life in the first two days of the war.
The fake accounts used pro-Israel hashtags such as #IStandWithIsrael to slip Hamas propaganda into feeds of people who supported the Jewish state.
The pattern repeated in June 2025, after the firebombing of a march for Israeli hostages in Boulder, Colorado. Working with the Combat Antisemitism Movement, Cyabra found that 22 percent of the antisemitic accounts celebrating the attack were inauthentic, and those accounts still drew millions of views.
Exposed by an Iranian Blackout
The clearest proof came from Iran. Cyabra had been tracking a network of fake profiles posing as Scottish independence supporters on X, posting about British politics. When Israel struck Iran on June 13, 2025, and the regime shut down the country’s internet, the network went silent for 16 days. When the accounts returned, they had switched to anti-Israel and pro-Iranian messaging, generating more than 126,000 engagements. Cyabra CEO Dan Brahmy said the sudden blackout “exposed the entire operation.” The same accounts went quiet again during Iran’s internet shutdown in January 2026.
“Gazans” in Egypt, Pakistan and Nigeria
In November 2025, X began displaying the country where each account is based. Accounts presenting themselves as eyewitnesses in Gaza turned out to be operating from Egypt, Pakistan, Poland, and Afghanistan. One account that raised tens of thousands of dollars as a young civilian in Gaza was run from Nigeria. The Quds News Network, which claims more than 600,000 followers and lists its location as “Palestine,” was shown to be based in Egypt. An Israeli government analysis of 500 accounts claiming to be in Gaza found that only 37.5 percent were actually located where they said. “Exposed,” Israel’s Foreign Ministry posted. “New X feature ripped mask off countless fake ‘Gazan’ accounts.”
Fake Followers for Anti-Israel Influencers
Cyabra has also measured how fake accounts inflate individual anti-Israel influencers. A May 2024 analysis of tens of thousands of X accounts found that, on average, 25 percent of the users interacting with prominent anti-Israel influencers were fake. Gazan influencer Motaz Azaiza’s following jumped from 31,000 to more than one million in less than a month, and about 23 percent of his followers and 25 percent of his commenters were fake. In a sample of 12,510 followers of Jackson Hinkle, an American influencer who sympathizes with Russia, China, Iran, and Hamas, 40 percent were fake. Cyabra found the same overlapping bot network promoting five influencers with different ideologies, which the company said points to a single source coordinating them. Mendelsohn told The Jerusalem Post that bot activity of 4 to 7 percent is normal on social media and 10 percent is unusual. “When it’s 25% then the bells start ringing,” he said.
A Quarter to a Third
The proportion has held steady across years and political camps. In 2018, ahead of the US midterm elections, an ADL study by Oxford researcher Samuel Woolley analyzed 7.5 million tweets and found that nearly 30 percent of the accounts repeatedly posting slurs against Jews were likely bots. The campaign came from the far right, with most harassing tweets carrying right-wing hashtags. Across the studies that measured it, roughly a quarter to a third of the accounts pushing anti-Jewish and anti-Israel content have been fake. The majority were real people, and the fake minority was large enough to shape what millions of others saw.
The Limits of the Numbers
The numbers carry limits. Cyabra’s 25 percent figure measures fake profiles within a given conversation, and no study has produced a single global percentage of anti-Israel content generated by bots. Fake accounts also fail when nobody sees them. Clemson University researcher Darren Linvill examined a Chinese bot farm X had flagged for attacking American data centers and found its posts drew almost no engagement. “No real humans saw these posts about data centers,” he said.
The operations that do damage hijack real conversations, borrow real hashtags and pass themselves off as Gazans, Americans, or Scottish activists until real people repeat their words. Whatever capacity the Yandex strikes knocked out will return. Yandex has already signed agreements with rival Russian cloud providers Selectel, K2Cloud, and VK Cloud to move its customers’ data and services, and Kyiv Post warned that malign online operations may resume soon.
The Cost of a False Story
For Israel’s defenders, the false Yandex story carries a cost. Every debunked chart hands ammunition to those who insist that reports of anti-Israel bot networks are invented. The documented record needs no embellishment. One in four accounts in the online war over October 7 was fake. An Iranian network switched from Scottish politics to attacking Israel the moment it came back online. And the “Gazan eyewitnesses” moving millions of Western readers were typing from Egypt, Pakistan, and Nigeria.
