I keep seeing news stories like this, trying to debunk the idea that Ukraine’s drone strikes against Yandex did not cause a massive outage of apparent bots on social media. So far all the pieces like this I’ve seen hinge on trying to say that the Cloudflare graph is for search bots, not social media bots. And then they bring out a bunch of experts in the space (who track the data science more closely than I do, I have no doubt), who said “We don’t see it.”

But the simple fact is on Twitter now, you do see it. Even still. The difference is day and night. If you go onto “controversial” tweets, or look at the White House timeline for recent tweets, it’s all people with extremely critical hot takes against that account.

So, I think we can say, search bots do not equal social media “bots.” But beyond that, how much evidence of which kind proves the difference that is everywhere obvious when you go on Twitter?