Ukrainian strikes on three data centers belonging to Yandex, Russia’s dominant search and technology company, have become the centerpiece of a new claim from President Volodymyr Zelensky: that knocking Russian infrastructure offline has quietly made social media less toxic for ordinary users around the world.
Speaking at the Warsaw Security Forum, Zelensky said the attacks on facilities located within roughly 100 to 200 miles of Moscow had disabled swarms of automated accounts. He argued that the effect was noticeable to casual internet users, according to remarks reported by The Daily Wire.
“When we started responding to Russia’s operation against our data centers, and when our strikes reached Yandex’s data centers, it suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social media platforms,” Zelensky said. “A lot of people noticed it. There was less hate, less division, and fewer provocations.”
He went further, suggesting the sudden disappearance of bot activity proved where the bots originated. “Because there were fewer bots,” he said. “And it’s pretty clear where those bots were coming from — if they disappeared when Yandex went offline.”
A claim that fits a familiar narrative
The Daily Wire, which published an analysis of the episode, characterized the remarks as “pretty shameless, ridiculous stuff” even by the standards of wartime messaging. The outlet argued that Zelensky is presenting three Russian data centers as ground zero for online hatred in a bid to keep Western money and weapons flowing to Kyiv.
The core of that critique is that the claim flatters a preexisting belief among many Americans — dating back to the 2016 election — that Russian operatives can hack or manipulate nearly anything online. The Daily Wire argued that this framing lets Democrats avoid reckoning with their own political failures by pinning blame on Moscow, and that Zelensky is now exploiting the same reflex.
The publication also tied the episode to broader anxieties about data centers and artificial intelligence, suggesting the story will resurface as a political theme heading into next month’s elections and likely beyond.
The underlying problem both sides can agree on
Beneath the dispute over Zelensky’s specific claim, The Daily Wire acknowledged a real and widely shared problem: public trust in online information has collapsed, and for good reason. The outlet pointed to undisclosed paid influence campaigns across the political spectrum as evidence that manipulation is routine, not exceptional.
It cited a Wall Street Journal investigation published earlier this year that documented influencers taking large sums without disclosure. Among the examples: Alex Bruesewitz, a 28-year-old former Trump campaign aide, urged marijuana reclassification to his more than 640,000 followers on X without mentioning that a political action committee funded by major legal cannabis players had just paid him $300,000, according to the Journal.
The same reporting described Israel planning to spend $900,000 on an influencer campaign aimed at a U.S. audience, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meeting conservative social media figures on at least two visits. The solar and health industries were said to have paid influencers thousands of dollars, while Qatar and beverage interests also courted online political voices.
Tenet Media and the soda episode
The Daily Wire recalled its own experience with Tenet Media, a outlet that seemed to appear everywhere at once before the Justice Department presented evidence that Russian operatives had secretly funded it. The outlet noted it had cited Tenet’s reporting once or twice and that, for the most part, the work was legitimate — though the DOJ alleged the operation took millions from foreign sources. It was never proven in court that Tenet’s personnel knew the money originated in Russia.
A separate example involved the 2025 fight over whether soda purchases should remain eligible for SNAP benefits. The Daily Wire described a wave of conservatives with large followings suddenly advocating to preserve food-stamp eligibility for soda — a position the outlet called incoherent for anyone genuinely committed to shrinking the program. The piece alleged soda companies paid influencers through a third-party firm to push the message while hiding the sponsorship, a routine it said usually goes undetected.
The common thread across all of it, according to the analysis: advertising works best when audiences believe it is organic, and the line between political speech and undisclosed corporate or foreign lobbying is blurrier than most users assume.
A concentrated internet, easily steered
The Daily Wire framed the Zelensky episode against a larger shift in how people consume information. Despite the web growing from roughly 250 million sites in 2010 to more than a billion today, the outlet observed that most users now visit only a handful of destinations — Instagram, X, a premium news subscription, an AI chatbot — rather than browsing widely. That concentration, it argued, makes the public far easier to manipulate than the internet’s original promise suggested.
Whether or not Zelensky’s data-center strikes actually thinned out bot networks, the debate they triggered lands in the middle of a trust crisis that no single bombing run is likely to resolve.
Source: www.dailywire.com — https://www.dailywire.com/news/how-scammers-make-money-by-infesting-the-internet-with-bots