Yes, a US president just announced an "energy ceasefire" in Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Unfortunately, he forgot to tell the combatants. Putin celebrated by sending glide bombs into a children's playground. Ukraine meanwhile destroyed four Yandex data servers in Sasovo, Kaluga, Vladimir and Mytishchi, near Moscow.
The results were immediate. Hundreds of thousands of Russian bots sourced from the Yandex server died immediately. And the results of that can almost be seen from space:
And almost immediately, those bots died -- bots pretending to represent real people, purporting to be "patriots," "veterans," or "Christian conservative fathers" -- usually with a follower count approaching zero and a user name running into at least 7 digits -- and all those posts supporting UK's Reform, Germany's AfD, and Trump's MAGAts suddenly fell off a cliff.
The tide went out on the scam, at least for a moment. The Kremlin intelligence psyop that has been poisoning politics is exposed, and we can see which rotten political life has been swimming naked -- . .
In one night, Zelenskyy "single-handedly improved social media more than any governments have in years of legislation." As Megham McCarthy quipped, "I would pay Ukraine a monthly fee to keep blowing up Russian bots."
In one night, the Axis of Online Upheaval died -- and with it the manufactured support for the Axis of Upheaval itself.
And for a brief time we get to see the effect of the one major weapon Russia really has: the ability to disrupt the west with disinformation.
Naturally, folk have been checking and testing. Without bot traffic, check out for example the responses to the White House's latest ludicrous announcement. And see how this test went ...
And whatever your views about Twitter, or whatever the hell the owner wants to call it now, "where else can you see a Ukrainian drone manufacturer trolling Russian internet executives after blowing up their data centres?"
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