Patrick Boyle On Finance · Oct 18, 2026 · 36m · 28m saved
With Patrick Boyle, former hedge fund manager and finance professor
A chart claiming that Russian bot activity around Germany's AfD party collapsed when Ukrainian drones hit Russian data centers drew more than 4 million views. It also contained data for three days that had not happened yet.
Plenty of people wanted the story to be true. Patrick Boyle, a former hedge fund manager and finance professor, used his show Patrick Boyle On Finance to check what the strikes actually hit, and found that the troll farms kept working while a search engine's crawler went dark.
"The traffic that collapsed was almost entirely Yandex's search crawlers... the internet had spent the weekend celebrating the destruction of a search engine's filing clerk." — Patrick Boyle
Patrick teaches finance and ran money professionally, and he reads a market reaction the way an investor would: Yandex's share price barely moved.
The full episode is covered here so you can skip it. 36 minutes of audio, 8 minutes of reading.
Here are the 6 insights that matter.
Key Takeaways
The viral chart of collapsing Russian bot activity had no source, no platform and three days of data from the future
Cloudflare's drop in Russian bot traffic was mostly Yandex's own search crawler, not propaganda accounts
Russia's 2014 data-localization law put much of its digital economy in a few buildings within drone range
Yandex shares took only a modest hit, because the cloud unit that burned is about 4% of revenue
Ordinary people, not bots, spread most fake news
0.3% of users in a 2024 study shared 80% of it, by hand, at an average age of 58
An AI model spread across hijacked devices has no single point to shut down, unlike a data center
1. A Chart From the Future
The story started with a graph. A member of the European Parliament posted it on Twitter, claiming online activity around the AfD fell the moment Ukrainian drones struck Russian data centers.
Patrick Boyle says the chart's most convincing feature was data that did not exist yet
"It was viewed more than 4 million times and it was very convincing, not least because it included data from 3 days in the future." — Patrick Boyle
German fact-checkers at DW and Capital traced it to a Threads account they could not verify, and could not rule out AI involvement. The axis was unlabeled and its gridlines uneven, which exaggerated the apparent plunge.
"The chart didn't name a data source, didn't say which online platform it covered and didn't say what it was measuring." — Patrick Boyle
