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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 𝕏71 percent. Germany’s far-right AfD party allegedly saw a 𝕏similar pattern, and mentions of 𝕏“Palestine” and 𝕏“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
