Sherwood Park News has reported:

Social media posts claiming recent attacks on Russian data centres disrupted accounts boosting political messages in Alberta are circulating across the province, but the connection is not supported by available evidence. Posts on several platforms say the attacks exposed or disrupted Russian bot networks promoting Alberta-focused content. Some also claim sharp drops in traffic for particular accounts, websites or personalities.

Screenshots cited in the posts show view counts for individual posts. They do not establish a decline in an account’s overall audience or connect any such decline to foreign influence operations.

Attacks on data centres operated by Yandex, Russia’s largest search engine and a major technology company, did disrupt some of the company’s services. Public Cloudflare data also showed a sharp drop in automated traffic from Yandex’s network after the attacks. Technology publications, including The Deep Dive, reported that the figures reflected automated traffic associated with the network, while cautioning that the charts could not identify who operated the systems or show whether political campaigns were affected.

The anonymous, independent project antibot4navalny, which tracks Russian online influence campaigns, said the charts likely reflected Yandex’s automated web crawlers and other services. It said they were not evidence that political bot networks had suddenly gone offline.

The available data point to disruption of Yandex services, not proof that political influence campaigns were affected. The source contact listed for the report is TWilkie@postmedia.com.