Russia’s online bots ‘disappeared’ for 24 hours – our reaction shows how broken the internet is

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Andy Burnham would have rejoiced. The much-maligned Russian bots he has accused of interfering with public discourse disappeared from the internet for a period of time earlier this week.

Or at least, that’s what people on social media seemed to believe. Following Ukrainian drone strikes on data centres operated by Yandex, Russia’s equivalent of Google, graphs circulated showing a near-total collapse in automated traffic from the company’s servers. For those convinced that much of the political debate we see online is being manipulated by the Kremlin, it appeared to be vindication.

Except it wasn’t quite true. The graphs showed a collapse in automated traffic from Yandex’s network, much of it generated by the web crawlers that help its search engine function. There’s no evidence that Russian disinformation accounts on social media disappeared, or that their activity was meaningfully affected by the attacks.

Russia’s industrial-scale disinformation machine being switched off would be hugely welcome – so much so that even the slightest hint it had happened made many of us believe it. That speaks to how poor our relationship with the internet is: we now assume that anyone who disagrees with us, or who expresses an opinion we find objectionable, must be part of some coordinated campaign to mislead us.

To be fair, we’ve got good reason to be suspicious. Russia has spent years trying to manipulate conversations online, using everything from fake accounts to supposedly independent news outlets to spread its messages. And we regularly learn that other countries are copying its playbook. Just last week, OpenAI revealed details of a Russian-influence operation that used ChatGPT to support campaigns targeting countries across Latin America, where Russians adopted fake identities, fabricated documents and even created a research organisation with real employees who had no idea they were working for Russian interests.

That’s evidence that there are genuine threats out there, and they deserve to be taken seriously. But the scale of the problem means we’ve started seeing conspiracies everywhere.

Big tech firms aren’t exactly helping matters. Social networks have spent years perfecting algorithms designed to keep us scrolling, clicking – and arguing. Recent research found that Twitter’s algorithm amplified angry, politically divisive content into our feeds – even though users didn’t actually prefer the posts it recommended.

Our tech is helping create the environment that makes us suspicious of everyone else. We’re served a steady diet of increasingly inflammatory opinions and AI slop designed to push our buttons, then left wondering whether the people expressing them are even real. And we all lose out as a result. Trust in news has fallen to just 37 per cent across 48 countries across the world, the lowest level since the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism began measuring it in 2015. Nearly two-thirds of respondents said they were concerned about misinformation online.

Healthy scepticism is good – the clue is in the name. But only up to a point. We absolutely should question what we’re told, particularly when it comes from anonymous accounts making extraordinary claims. But there’s a difference between being sceptical and being so cynical that you refuse to believe anything at all. And we’re tiptoeing close to that line.

The Yandex scandal is a perfect example. People were so convinced that their political opponents were largely fictional that they jumped on a misleading graph as definitive proof that a conspiracy had been outed. That becomes worrying when we start treating other human beings as computer-generated fakes just because we happen to disagree with them.

Those levels of scepticism will only get worse as AI permeates our society. Generative AI tools can already produce convincing text, photographs, audio and video at a scale that would once have been unimaginable. The campaigns the prime minister warned about this week used to take an entire army unit of soldiers to staff. These days someone running a disinformation campaign can just type a few commands into an AI system and press “Go”. When almost anything can be fabricated, it becomes much easier to dismiss something inconvenient as a deepfake, whether it actually is or not.

We’re inching into an information environment where we’re being encouraged to distrust everything, while the platforms on which we spend so much of our lives continue profiting from the arguments that distrust creates.

So how do we solve it? We need to maintain some scepticism but become better at distinguishing between evidence and assumption, and recognising when our own prejudices are poisoning our trust in others. Much as we might wish otherwise, the person spouting rubbish at us on the internet might just be a real human being with a terrible opinion. And if we can’t accept that, we’re going to find it pretty difficult to have a meaningful conversation with anyone.

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