Those data centers participate hugely in generating of internet misinformation and propaganda that shapes deterioration of support in European populations. Those are valid military targets.
You could, of course, repurpose a data-center to run a bunch of emulators and have some h/w to plug in a bunch of SIM cards, but... why? It probably won't be very cost-efficient, and you need some bespoke h/w and virtualization solution to do it...
The bot traffic the news about bombing data-centers refers to is the crawler type. They collect information and index it for later searches, they don't interact with social media.
NB. valid and high value targets are not the same. Valid means it furthers some military goals while minimizing civilian impact. High-value means that it has a potential to alter opponent's strategy.
I'm on the fence about whether data-centers are valid targets. But, even if they aren't, it's not a terrible thing to do to bomb them, as it will not have any severe adverse effects on the civilian population. Of course, in the context of a war where there are much worse things to bomb. But the parent was making a comment about data-centers being high-value targets, and I don't see a way to justify that. It probably doesn't even factor into the calculations of the military strategists.
What's missing for me here is how the data-centers can be connected to generating comments on social media. They are simply not good for doing that. For example, the IP ranges of data-centers are well known, it would be very easy to distinguish between a comment originating from a plausibly private-looking network and data-center network. They are also easy to ban wholesale.
The typical h/w in a data-center isn't designed for the tasks like publishing multiple plausibly authentically looking comments. It would need to pretend to run multiple desktop browser sessions or multiple phone browser sessions. It would need to do this to accumulate some cookies to create an appearance of a real user.
Data-centers are cost-effective when you need to do things in aggregates, or if you have tasks that require large amounts of compute / storage / network. They offer no obvious benefit when it comes to imitating multiple individual desktop or phone users because their h/w is more expensive than the consumer-grade variety. The obvious better way to do that is to buy cheap phones in bulk and run them through user-space application that automates Web browsing.
In a way, what you are suggesting is like building a train track in order to take your child to school: you can make it work, but it will be a lot more expensive than just walking, or, at most, driving to school.
Those things are measurable.
Even if that number is disputable you can measure how many new media posts are about various european issues that russia might want to focus and see how that correlates with Yandex capacity being taken offline.
You keep saying this without saying how did you measure...
> you can measure how many new media posts
How? I don't have that kind of capacity. Maybe someone else has, but I don't know anyone who does.
This all reads like a media stunt.