UK Reform social media engagement drop after strikes on Russia data centres

Ukrainian forces carried out coordinated strikes on several Russian data centres that reportedly crippled Yandex, the country’s dominant search provider said to control more than 70% of domestic search traffic. Analysts at Tom’s Hardware measured a collapse in bot traffic from the Yandex network - down to about 0.4% of the maximum HTTP requests seen over the previous two weeks - effectively silencing a large proportion of automated, Russian-hosted accounts. Researchers including David Colon say this disruption has already weakened Russia-linked information operations such as Storm-1516, with noticeable drops in narrative performance and engagement in countries like France and Germany and reduced amplification around the German far-right AfD. Volodymyr Zelensky described social media as becoming “a little easier to breathe” after the strikes.

That silencing appears to have hit social reach for UK political figures associated with Reform. Posts by deputy leader Richard Tice to roughly 400,000 followers failed to reach triple-digit reposts or comments and sometimes drew under 10,000 views, while Zia Yusuf’s clip reached about 8,000 views in three hours despite a 158,000-follower base, compared with prior tweets that exceeded 100,000 views. Nigel Farage saw similar falls: a policy clip on X logged roughly 60,000 views in three hours versus his usual six-figure performance. The pattern suggests much of previous engagement was driven by automated amplification linked to the Yandex-hosted bot network.