To be fair, it’s too recent for us to have any robust data and analysis over it, but anecdotal and loosely backed claims do suggest a moderately reduced activity overall on contrarian accounts on popular platforms. The minority populists, depending on the country whether they are far right or some left wing niche.

I don’t believe the actual computational shape of a yandex data center would be right or efficient for bot farms, but i do think any external bot farms would use yandex’s indices and the currently trending hype word, “crawlers”, and all that, actual data center shaped work and resource, to carry out their work. The impact, if it’s real and not just imagined which is also entirely possible, would be the lack of resources for the bot farms to find the content to interact with and be efficient with the opinion shaping. That wouldn’t outright stop their work, just make it less efficient and convenient, which would make it slower and more laborious, which, if the anecdotes and such are right, would indeed show up as slightly decreased activity, not a full stop for the activity.

But right now it all depends on the anecdotes or the still fresh and dubious data claims, so it might just be there’s no real impact anywhere. But if there was an impact indeed, this would explain it. Nobody runs any sort of content mills manually, it’s all automated over something. Yandex indices seem entirely plausible as one part of that, and perhaps rented shared computational capacity to some extent too. And whatever else they might be using.

To be fair, I feel like either way it’s all blown out of proportions. The impact is definitely real, there’s real loss of compute and capacity, but I can’t see the bot farms and content mills being a primary symptom or anywhere close. Smells like populist and opportunistic media just doing their thing under capitalism and also the very same concept of opinion shaping on the “western” side of the conflict to me.