For two days, Elon Musk’s posts averaged 11,000 likes and then 8,000, compared with daily averages ranging from 17,000 to 81,000 during October. The decline followed Ukrainian attacks on data centers run by Russian tech company Yandex, which prompted claims that the strikes had silenced Russian bots. The timing stands out, but it doesn’t prove the attacks caused Musk’s lower engagement.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told reporters that three strikes on Yandex data centers the previous week had been successful. He said Russian bot activity on social media platforms had notably decreased. “it suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social media platforms,” he said. “A lot of people noticed it, and there was less hate, less division and fewer provocations because there were fewer bots,” he added. “And it’s pretty clear where those bots were coming from.”
Attention turned to Musk’s Twitter-turned-X account, where users noticed a possible change in engagement. YouTuber Zack “Jerry Rig Everything” Nelson wrote that Musk was getting “less than 5k likes on his tweets after the bot farm got exploded.” Nelson’s post included a screenshot showing 4,900 likes on Musk’s “Wow” reply to a racist conspiracy theory claiming Brussels, Belgium, is “only 10.5 percent white.”
The screenshot is a single example, not a measure of activity across the platform. The reported daily averages do show a brief decline: Musk’s posts received between 17,000 and 81,000 likes per day throughout October, then averaged 11,000 and 8,000 over the two days in question. The numbers stand out, but they don’t tell us what caused the change.
Cloudflare said Yandex traffic dropped by 99 percent the previous week, after the strikes. The company noted, however, that this didn’t necessarily mean social media bot activity had fallen. Its data covered all automated internet requests, including search engine crawlers and monitoring tools. The figures show a steep decline in Yandex traffic, but don’t establish that Russian social media bots were disabled.
Online claims also circulated that activity around Germany’s far-right party, Alternative for Germany (AfD), had plunged. Euronews said those reports hadn’t been independently verified. Zelensky’s office later clarified his statement, telling the BBC that he was “talking about the atmosphere on social media,” not reporting a specific drop in bot activity.
Data centers have become major targets in ongoing geopolitical conflict. Low-cost drone attacks have also disrupted major AI data center expansion efforts across the Middle East, where Iran has targeted facilities during hostilities with the United States. Still, the evidence available doesn’t show that the Yandex strikes led to a sustained change in Russian influence activity or Musk’s engagement.
The United States holds midterm elections less than a month from now. Russian interference, especially during the 2016 presidential elections, has prompted heated debate for years. Musk, one of President Donald Trump’s biggest supporters, has become an influential voice in those discussions. Most recently, he accused Zelensky of having gone “too far” by striking Russian oil refineries.
Former U.S. ambassador to Russia and political science professor Michael McFaul welcomed the strikes. He tweeted: “As someone harassed daily by armies of Russian bots, my deepest thanks!” His comment describes his own experience and doesn’t independently confirm broader claims about bot activity.
