Beautiful AfD-Bot Theory Collapses Under Scrutiny
Monitoring orgs · 13.10.2026

Красивая история разлетелась по интернету за два дня: украинцы бомбят российские дата-центры, и — о чудо! — боты, разгоняющие AfD, вдруг притихли.

Wait, let me translate properly:

A beautiful story spread across the internet in just two days: Ukrainians are bombing Russian data centers, and — oh wonder! — the bots boosting AfD suddenly went quiet. Green party MP Robin Schlingheider posts this on Threads, Czech MEP Tomáš Zdechovský shares it on X, and Standard and Focus pick it up. Beautiful, dramatic, and completely unconfirmed.

What's actually confirmed: bot traffic dropped specifically from the Russian autonomous system AS13238 — that's Yandex, which, according to its own status monitor, is currently experiencing massive outages. But overall Russian bot traffic, according to Cloudflare data, hasn't notably dropped. And this is about the internet as a whole — payment apps, maps, websites — not specifically about social media bots pushing AfD.

The devil is in the terminology: "bot" refers to search crawlers, API requests, AI parsers, and vulnerability scanners alike. Non-human traffic makes up more than half of all internet traffic worldwide. Social bots work differently altogether: they disguise themselves as humans and are essentially invisible to monitoring systems like Cloudflare.

The first to raise doubts were Reddit users, the Bluesky account antibot4navalny, and Raphael Wimmer, a computer science professor from Regensburg — he suspected the original graphic was AI-generated. He asked Schlingheider for his data source and was blocked. CeMAS also found no drop in inorganic likes and retweets, though it acknowledges that pro-Russian campaign activity naturally dips on weekends — they operate on weekdays, like all respectable people. Developer Michael Paulauski showed that engagement on the AfD's X account hadn't dropped at all.

And then comes the best part of the story. On October 13, Schlingheider updated his post with an admission: he'd made a mistake, taking the graphic from someone else's post without checking it. The original post has since been deleted. The beautiful theory evaporated faster than the load on Yandex's data centers.

Source: https://netzpolitik.org/2026/angriffe-auf-yandex-aus-brennenden-rechenzentren-in-russland-wird-kein-bot-ausfall-bei-der-afd/