Ukraine Is Successfully Bombing the Heart of Russia's Disinformation Machine
cmarmitage.substack.com
cmarmitage.substack.com
If the strongest "evidence" is anecdotal reports that pro-Russia posting on Reddit decreased that seems more like Redditor confirmation bias and delusion than proof of a propaganda bot farm co-located with Yandex
> Ukraine Is Successfully Bombing the Heart of Russia's Disinformation Machine
Proof from within TFA:
> Yandex is the Kremlin’s information machine. It answers about 70% of search queries in Russia
> The director of Yandex News resigned in 2022 and called the company “a key element in concealing information” about the war
> the assistant inside Yandex Browser, which has 71 million monthly users, in a 2026 study by the research group Policy Genome found Alice endorsed Kremlin narratives in 86% of its Russian-language answers
> Cloudflare, the internet security company that fronts a large share of the world’s websites, measured automated requests from Yandex’s network at 0.4% of their two-week peak after the Vladimir strike
So, it’s used by most people in Russia, it regurgitates disinformation, and the attack seems to have depressed its use.
Sounds good to me - what are you missing?
However there was a flurry of posts that troll farm (conflated with "bots") activity dropped and consequently support for parties/people/politicians they don't like has dropped. Which ironically was propaganda.
It mentions the r/conservative accounts, but tells us about a day they skipped a year ago when attacks happened. And the rest is the same. Nothing ties this to the current data center attacks. This is basically just propaganda in the direction I like. I hate it. Right now I basically have to back up my gut feeling about this current event with prior incidents.
This author seems content with that, but I'm not. Being content with that is a good way to be complacent and nod along to things that either aren't true or give your adversary more credit than they deserve.
Gleaning some semblance of nuanced, balanced reality has never been easy but in recent years it feels much harder. None of the handful political perspectives, media outlets or public policy institutions I felt I could usually trust are still reliably trustworthy. They've either been partially co-opted by special interests or have just grown muddled and conflicted on some issues. Even the ACLU, an org which for decades was so principled on free speech it marched in support of the KKK's right to speak, now feels some legal speech is too 'problematic' to be heard. Staying rigorously consistent now requires questioning everything, especially things specifically designed to appeal to my biases or emotional sensibilities.
In general most accusations are confessions, pay attention to people who use words like disinformation and misinformation. They want to control other people's speech.