On October 11, Tomáš Zdechovský, a Czech member of the European Parliament, shared a chart suggesting that online activity around Germany’s AfD had plunged after Russian data centers were hit. “If confirmed, this is telling,” he wrote. The graphic displayed precise percentages, without identifying a platform, a list of accounts or a counting method.

Posted on October 11, the chart plotted activity through October 15, including days that had not happened yet.

A U.S. technology site headlined its story with the claim that Russian disinformation bot traffic had nearly vanished overnight, and a French daily linked the attacks to a decline in bots supporting Trump and the AfD. Researchers checking the networks they monitor for Russian influence operations found continued posting, while a separate internet traffic chart recorded a collapse in automated requests from Yandex’s network.

Zdechovský’s post had been viewed more than four million times by Tuesday. The graphic claimed a 56% fall in AfD-related activity and also displayed a 30% drop. Neither figure came with an identifiable dataset. Zdechovský later said he “did not present it as a clear fact”; the post remained pinned to his profile.

At the Warsaw Security Forum on October 12, President Volodymyr Zelensky said “it suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social media platforms.” He continued: “There was less hate, less division, and fewer provocations because there were fewer bots, and it’s pretty clear where those bots were coming from.”

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Editor-in-Chief and founder of Implicator.ai. Former ARD correspondent and senior broadcast journalist with 10+ years covering tech. Writes daily briefings on policy and market developments. Based in San Francisco. E-mail: editor@implicator.ai