The recent Ukrainian drone strikes that shut down 3 out of 5 major Rusky data centres has become interesting insofar that it has drawn attention to something quite insidious. The strike has disrupted AI infrastructure, cloud platforms & everyday digital services. Not great news for the Ruskies, to be sure - & certainly not great news for their misinformation & propaganda management facilities - but depending on what side of the spectrum you are on - it’s enlightening. The drone strike damaged Yandex facilities in Kuluga, Sasovo & Vladimir - & severely disrupted online misinformation by crippling the physical infrastructure & AI supercomputers used to generate &automate state-backed propaganda. “Data tracking from platforms like Cloudflare revealed that immediately following the strikes, Rusky bot traffic on the web plummeted to just 0.4% of its recent peak - effectively choking off foreign troll operations in the short term”. It’s interesting that bot traffic plummets on the web after Russia loses over half of their data centres. Furthermore .. “Most modern misinformation relies on vast automated bot networks to artificially amplify FAKE narratives on platforms like X, TikTok & Facebook. Because the targeted Yandex data hubs hosted substantial cloud infrastructure, taking them offline directly severed the connection to thousands of coordinated bot accounts. Security researchers noted that this structural damage forces an immediate drop-off in the sheer volume of spam and coordinated influence campaigns globally” “Kremlin-backed influence groups (such as Storm-1516 or the Doppelgänger network) heavily utilize artificial intelligence to create cheap deepfakes, clone news websites, and manipulate text at scale. (The Guardian) The strike on the Sasovo facility specifically targeted a hub housing two of Yandex’s three AI supercomputers used to train advanced language models.(BBC) Without the high-performance computing power needed to render deepfakes & generate automated, localized fake news articles in real-time, the Kremlin’s ability to run advanced, AI-driven campaigns is significantly throttled (BBC). A hidden front of online misinformation is LLM grooming - where Russian networks flood the open web with millions of pro-Kremlin articles to intentionally poison the data scraped by Western AI chatbots (like ChatGPT or Gemini). Over 80 digital and cloud services were forced completely offline by these strikes. By bringing down these networks and their hosting infrastructure, Ukraine has paused the generation of the "poisoned" data that chatbots accidentally cite as fact” 🙄🤔 While these strikes may not permanently eliminate Russia’s decentralised cyber-warfare capabilities - they’ve dealt a blow to the scale, the automation and the speed at which online misinformation can be deployed globally. It has also drawn attention to just how much Russia has been involved in global cyber propaganda and how much they have been interfering in foreign affairs through manipulation via social media platforms globally. I’m pretty sure this is the tip of the iceberg. Russia have been doing shyte like this for a very long time and they are very good at it. Those who control the dissemination of information control the world - regardless of whether that information is actually true or not. The Russians over the last few decades have developed that into an art form. For the most part, online social media platforms accommodate the massive amount of manipulation of information, misinformation and lies - and those who participate on these online platforms are either the protagonists or the victims. It is sickening to see just how much information is manipulated and just how many people are being manipulated. People might want to take a really good look at what is really going on. The Russian-bot mantra is not a fairy story. Let’s see if this post gets any traction with the algorithms. It certainly won’t with the bots today.