'They’re all gone!' White House 'bot' supporters AWOL after Russian data center hit

Supporters of the White House barely showed up in replies to its latest post about election fraud, as critics claimed its “bots” vanished after drones hit a Russian data center.

“Under President Trump, criminals who disrupt the integrity of America’s elections will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” the White House wrote on X Monday.

The post shared a Justice Department announcement of charges against 16 people accused of illegal voting, fraudulent voter registration and related election crimes.

A Raw Story review of the 176 most relevant replies Monday found that 138 opposed or mocked the White House. Only 19 backed it, and 19 more could not be classified.

“So Trump and Elon are going to jail?” one user asked.

“Hey! Where’d all the bots go?!?” another user wrote.

“Are you sad your RUSSIAN bot farms were destroyed?” a third user asked.

“Sixteen down, tens of thousands to go!” wrote one of the few users who backed the White House.

“Holy s— read the comments. The bots are completely gone,” Quadcarl, an X user with nearly 48,000 followers, wrote 22 minutes after the White House posted.

“Lmao usually these posts are filled with bootlicking bots….they’re all gone!” wrote the account Wu Tang is for the Children, which has more than 300,000 followers.

Their posts on X show the claim spread among popular accounts, but the posts are not evidence that it is true.

“Now that Russia data centers are getting pounded by Ukraine, your bots are going away,” another user replied to the White House.

Yandex, a Russian tech company sometimes called “Russia’s Google,” said Sunday that a drone attack completely shut down its data center in the Vladimir region, Reuters reported.

It was the third major Yandex data center knocked out in a few days, after strikes on sites in Sasovo and Kaluga, according to Reuters.

Yandex has blamed Ukraine for the Kaluga attack, but Ukraine has not officially claimed the strikes, The Deep Dive reported.

Automated traffic from Yandex’s network fell to near zero around the start of Oct. 11, according to Cloudflare Radar data cited by The Deep Dive. At one point that day, requests stood at 0.3% of the chart’s peak, compared with 88.2% at the same hour a week earlier.

The Deep Dive writer JP Alegre cautioned that knocking out so much of Yandex’s infrastructure would likely cut automated requests even if no influence operation ran there.

“The chart can’t separate fewer bots from fewer working servers,” Alegre wrote.