x.com/EYakoby/status/2109520626528469081
1 correction found
Cloudflare data shows automated traffic coming from Yandex's network has collapsed to roughly 0.4% of its recent peak. The amount of Russian bots on social media is truly insane.
The Cloudflare chart being cited is not a measure of Russian social-media bots. It tracks likely automated HTTP requests from Yandex’s network to sites behind Cloudflare, and Cloudflare explicitly treats Yandexbot as a verified search-engine crawler.
Full reasoning
Cloudflare's own Radar page for AS13238 (Yandex) says its bot/human view is "Bot (automated) vs. human HTTP requests distribution to HTML content" and is "Filtered to HTML responses, representing web page traffic." That is a web-traffic metric, not a count of social-media bot accounts or posts.
Cloudflare's Radar documentation likewise says its HTTP-request endpoints examine HTTP requests reaching websites served by Cloudflare's CDN, and that Radar values are usually shown as percentages or normalized using min-max, rather than as raw counts of social-media activity. So even if the Yandex chart dropped sharply, that does not mean Cloudflare measured a collapse in Russian social-media bot operations.
Cloudflare also lists Yandexbot as an example of a verified search engine crawler. In other words, automated traffic from Yandex's network can include ordinary search-indexing activity, not just malicious or political bots. The post is therefore misreading a Cloudflare web-crawling metric as proof about the scale of Russian bots on social media.
4 sources
- Traffic from AS13238 | Cloudflare Radar
Bot (automated) vs. human HTTP requests distribution to HTML content ... Percentage of HTTP requests classified as bot (automated) or human. Filtered to HTML responses, representing web page traffic.
- HTTP requests · Cloudflare Radar docs
HTTP requests examines complete HTTP requests from end users that reach websites served by Cloudflare’s CDN.
- Normalization methods · Cloudflare Radar docs
Cloudflare Radar does not normally return raw values. Instead, values are returned as percentages or normalized using min-max.
- Verified bots · Cloudflare bot solutions docs
Search engine crawler ... Example: Googlebot, Bingbot, Yandexbot, Baidubot.