In October 2026, Ukrainian drone strikes knocked out three of Yandex’s six major data centers, and a viral chart claimed that Russian bots had vanished from social media overnight. They hadn’t. In this video, we look at what the strikes actually hit: Yandex’s search crawlers, Russia’s taxi and payment apps, and the apartment gates of Moscow. We also look at why Russia’s data localization law left so much of its internet within drone range. Then we follow the real infrastructure of online influence operations, from residential proxy botnets and SIM farms to the off-brand 55-dollar Android TV boxes that rent out their owners’ internet connections. Along the way, we cover state-backed disinformation campaigns from Russia, China, Iran, and the West; the Sri Lankan academies teaching rage bait for Facebook ad revenue; the “supersharers” behind most fake news on Twitter; and new research from Anthropic on self-replicating AI that could run on the same cheap devices.
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