The social media engagement on posts from Reform UK figures appears to have dropped in the wake of Ukrainian strikes on Russian data centres.
Over the weekend, Ukraine carried out a co-ordinated drone strike against several major Russian data centres. This completely decimated Yandex, their Google equivalent which controls more than 70% of search traffic in the country, and has reportedly resulted in a dramatic fall in bot traffic from the Yandex network.
As per the bot analysts at Tom’s Hardware, bot traffic from the Yandex network has dropped to just 0.4% of the maximum number of HTTP requests recorded in the past two weeks. That means activity from automated, Russian-hosted accounts has been virtually eliminated on social media.
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There has already been a strong and significant impact on bot traffic in countries such as France and Germany. David Colon, a French information operations researcher, has noted a huge difference in the performance of narratives generated by the Russia-linked information operations group, Storm-1516.
The silencing of the bots also appears to have caused a dramatic drop in activity around far-right German party, the AfD.
Here in the UK, a similar thing may be happening.
On X, social media posts from Reform figures seem to have taken an engagement hit in the wake of the great bot silencing.
Take Richard Tice for example. Below are three posts on X from the Reform deputy leader to his almost 400,000 followers on Monday, 11 October. At the time of writing, none of the posts had hit triple figures for reposts or comments, with one not even reaching 10,000 views.
Before the Ukrainian strikes on the Russia data centres, Tice’s posts got considerably more engagement, consistently hitting triple figures for comments and reposts, whilst racking up hundreds of thousands of views.
A similar pattern can be seen when it comes to Zia Yusuf’s social media. Posts from him on Monday about Reform’s proposal to shut down the asylum system for a full parliamentary term generated surprisingly few comments or views.
Despite having 158,000 followers, a clip shared by Yusuf of him speaking about the policy generated just 8,000 views after three hours.
Compare and contrast this to last week, when a tweet from Yusuf directed at home secretary Shabana Mahmood got thousands of reposts and likes, and more than 100,000 views.
Even Reform leader Nigel Farage seems to have suffered in the wake of the bots disappearing.
He has 2.3m followers on X, but a clip of him announcing Reform’s asylum policy proposal had only mustered 60,000 views after three hours on the platform.
Another post earlier in the day has struggled to hit 1,000 likes and only had 35,000 views.
But have a quick scroll through his posts on X from last week and it’s difficult to find any posts that don’t hit 100,000 views.
As Zelensky himself said after the strikes on the data centres, it’s suddenly become a “little easier to breathe” on social media.