There is a difference between “coordinated inauthentic activity” on social media and “web crawlers.” The former are what people talk about when they are talking about “reply bots” and state-run “disinformation campaigns.” All major platforms have various prohibitions on such campaigns, and coordinated activity (including this garbage platform.) In general, it is difficult and costly to maintain automated social media accounts that bypass detection mechanisms used by platforms to curb such activity. Instead, such campaigns tend to rely on real humans, as they are cheaper, more varied in their response, and won’t get shut down by ToS violations. They also have to use VPNs or similar IP masquerading in order to avoid country-level blockages. Many platforms like X are not available in Russia, either, adding another technical hurdle for freelance actors. So other countries with low labor costs (India, Philippines, Indonesia, for example) may be employed instead. There is often no practical way to identify this traffic as inauthentic, until perhaps a major campaign pattern emerges, at which point it risks being shut down. Web crawlers, by contrast, are permitted activity and are used by major internet search providers such as Google and Yandex to “spider” the web and identify new web links and changes to sites. So that content providers know what this traffic is, they label themselves as “bots.” This is valid traffic. When you see a graph showing a sharp decline in “bot” traffic, it is indicating a change in this valid web crawling traffic. There is no one keeping graphs of “coordinated inauthentic activity” social media traffic; indeed if it was identifiable and graphable like this, it would already be shut down. So, blowing up data centers in Russia could conceivably hamper coordinated social media campaigns, if for some reason they had a dependency on services hosted there. But given the constraints on such campaigns, they are likely to be run from elsewhere. What has been disrupted, probably, is Yandex web crawler traffic. If one wishes, for optics, to honor the unilateral imposition of a “energy ceasefire,” blowing up datacenters is a good tactic and should be maximized. Blow them all up. But don’t pretend this has any meaningful impact on coordinated inauthentic social media activity. It does not, and is a different problem entirely. Pretending otherwise feeds magical thinking, incorrect ideas about how technology works, and reduces pressure on the adversary by claiming imaginary gains. Keep pressure up, and report gains clearly and correctly. If you want to go after social media campaigns, track them down, monitor their activity, and source their origins. Same as it ever was. Taking out datacenters is a nearly completely unrelated concern.