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On Monday, a spicy story was all over Twitter, and it went like this: Ukraine knocked out a large portion of Russian server capacity. This was a big blow to Russia’s chat bot army, and it caused noticeable changes to web traffic patterns. There was a claim that Tucker Carlson’s social media views dropped by 71 percent. Germany’s far-right AfD party allegedly saw a similar pattern, and mentions of “Palestine” and “Fauci” dropped off a cliff. The implication was clear: Much of the toxic fuckwittery that one encounters online is a Russian psyop, which many of us have wondered about for some time.
I really wanted this story to be true. It fit so many of my priors — I have often looked at a post and thought “There is no way that any functioning adult human is this dumb.” And the movements that I consider to be rancid piles of dinosaur shit were the ones implicated — the drop-offs happened to the revanchist right and illiberal left, not my favored centrist dweebs. It’s like I saw a headline that said “Study Finds That Trump, L.A. Dodgers Responsible for Simpsons Getting Bad” — I’m prone to believe it because it perfectly fits what I want to believe.
Sadly, the narrative appears to be mostly untrue. Parts of it are true — I’ll sort the mess out in a minute — but the “everyone you hate is a Russian intelligence bot” theory has not been substantiated. I hasten to point out that the theory has not been disproved, either — you are still free to believe that anyone who disagrees with you is a pile of binary code built to advance fascism. But that theory has not been proved yet. As of press time. Which is 8:19 PM EST on Tuesday, October 13, 2026 AD.
Here’s what did and didn’t happen, as reported by The Guardian and Ilya Lozovsky (but I’m adding dirty jokes and they added disappointingly few):
