Tag: Snopes News

Claim:

Maricopa County Elections in Arizona issued an apology to U.S. President Donald Trump after officials presented evidence showing state leaders ordered thousands of Trump voters’ ballots in the 2020 election to be destroyed and also to count immigrants’ illegally cast votes for Joe Biden.

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Ahead of the 2026 mideterm elections, people shared a purported “breaking” rumor alleging that Maricopa County Elections in Arizona issued an apology to President Donald Trump after officials made a striking discovery regarding the 2020 election results. The final tally showed Trump losing Arizona to former President Joe Biden by just under 11,000 votes.

According to the rumor, officials presented evidence that Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat who in 2020 was Arizona’s secretary of state, and former Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers, a Republican, ordered the destruction of tens of thousands of Trump voters’ ballots and also to count of tens of thousands of votes that immigrants lacking permanent legal status illegally cast to help elect Biden.

Snopes readers asked about this matter via email and searches.

This rumor was false. Searches for proof failed to find any credible sources reporting about Maricopa County Elections issuing an apology to Trump about large-scale voter fraud in the 2020 election. Instead, those queries indicated the original post came from a user who has shared similar misinformation before, including a false rumor about Georgia’s 2020 election results.

People sharing this story copied and pasted the same text, which touched on Trump’s false, oft-repeated claim that officials engaged in massive election fraud in 2020 — supposedly resulting in a “stolen election.” The Associated Press extensively investigated Trump’s claims involving battleground states and found no evidence of any large-scale fraud.

We emailed Maricopa County Elections to ask if the office could confirm that it did not issue an apology to Trump. We also emailed the White House to ask about this rumor and will update this article if we receive any further information.

Researching the rumor

Searches of Bing, DuckDuckGo, Google and Yahoo for keywords related to the rumor failed to locate any news media outlets credibly reporting about Maricopa County Elections issuing an apology to Trump — including from conservative publications and outlets supporting the Trump administration.

Instead, the searches found numerous social media users reposting the claim, for example on Facebook (archived), Gettr (archived) and X (archived). That “breaking” rumor read as follows:

🚨#BREAKING: The Maricopa County Board of Elections has issued an apology to President Trump, claiming that local officials presented evidence that then Secretary of State (now Governor) Katie Hobbs and then Speaker of the Arizona House Rusty Bowers personally ordered them to destroy tens of thousands of mail-in ballots for President Trump and to count tens of thousands cast by illegal aliens for Joe Biden in Arizona’s largest county during the 2020 election.

This is described as outcome-determinative fraud by those entrusted to conduct, oversee, and certify the vote; Hobbs and Bowers are alleged to have been paid by at least three hostile foreign governments, the George Soros Open Society Foundation, and the DNC in exchange for rigging the 2020 election in Arizona.

Simply put, there is now irrefutable and indisputable proof that President Trump won the state in that stolen election, spoken by the very people who counted the ballots.

LOCK THESE TREASONOUS CROOKS UP NOW! 💪🏻🔥🇺🇸

The posts improperly labeled the county’s elections body, officially named Maricopa County Elections, as the “Maricopa County Board of Elections.” The body’s website displays a footer reading, “Elections in Maricopa County are overseen by both the County Board of Supervisors and the County Recorder.”

Apparent origins of rumor

Searches of X for the above posts’ copied-and-pasted text indicated a user named Joshua Hall (@JoshHall2024) first posted the rumor (archived) on March 19. Hall’s post also began with the word “breaking.” We found the claim was neither breaking nor true, whether in March or this month.

(@JoshHall2024 via X)

According to Hall’s own posts, he appeared to be the same Joshua Hall that a judge sentenced to 20 months in prison for, as the Justice Department announced, “making threats to kill a member of the United States Congress” — fomer Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif. — and “impersonating family members of the then-President of the United States on social media to fraudulently raise funds for a fictitious political organization.”

Trump has at least once shared a screenshot on Truth Social (archived) of one of Hall’s X posts from December (archived) promoting a false claim about Georgia twice tallying hundreds of thousands of votes. That post said the state owed Trump an apology.

In March, Hall posted a newer iteration of the Georgia rumor (archived) similar to the one about Arizona, falsely claiming the Fulton County Board of Elections said it owed Trump an apology.

We privately messaged Hall to ask for evidence to support the rumor and have not received a response. He has not made any new X posts since July; he reportedly faces charges including stalking and witness intimidation, and jail records in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, show a man with the same name in custody.

‘Unsupported by factual evidence’

In early March — just days before Hall’s X post about Maricopa County — the FBI reportedly subpoenaed 2020 elections records to continue investigating Trump’s unfounded claims of fraud.

Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes, a Democrat, issued a statement in response, repeating details of elections officials’ exhaustive investigations and calling the claims “unsupported by factual evidence”:

The 2020 General Election in Arizona has been exhaustively reviewed. Multiple audits, court proceedings, and independent investigations — including those pursued by members of the same political party of the President — found no evidence of fraud sufficient to alter the outcome. These findings are not in dispute by any credible authority. The election results were certified, litigated, and affirmed.

In fact, under the direction of my predecessor, Attorney General Mark Brnovich, agents and support staff of the Arizona Attorney General’s Office spent over 10,000 hours investigating voting irregularities and alleged instances of illegal voting by high-profile election deniers. Complaints and allegations submitted to the Arizona Attorney General’s Office by members of the public were also unsupported by factual evidence.

On Oct. 5, Trump criticized Maricopa County elections officials for sending out more than 3,000 ballots six days early. The Maricopa County Recorder’s Office issued a statement saying that an election services company mistakenly mailed the ballots early, that the error “affected only the timing of the mailing” and that “the correct ballots were mailed to the correct voters.”

For further reading, we previously reported about a rumor claiming officials found 712,152 new votes for Trump in Arizona for the 2020 election.

Sources

Claim:

On Oct. 13, U.S. President Donald Trump posted an AI video on his Truth Social account showing himself playing with a tiger.

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In mid-October, social media users claimed U.S. President Donald Trump posted an AI-generated video of himself playing with a tiger.

The rumor spread days after a tiger mauled and killed a man at Yorkshire Wildlife Park in Doncaster, England, on Oct. 10. The clip shows an artificial intelligence tool’s depiction of Trump pointing his finger at the tiger before playfully wrestling and hugging it.

One X user who shared the footage wrote (archived), “Trump actually posted this AI video of him with a tiger in the middle of the night.”

Trump did indeed post the AI video on his Truth Social account, hours after sharing authentic footage of the moment a tiger attacked a man in the U.K. The AI clip Trump posted shows the president mimicking the hand gesture the British man made as the tiger attacked him in the authentic video. As such, we rate this claim true.

The president posted the AI-generated video (archived) on Truth Social late at night on Oct. 13.

Hours earlier, he posted (warning: the link contains violent and distressing content) authentic footage, meaning not AI-generated or digitally created, of a tiger mauling a man named William Chapman in an enclosure at Yorkshire Wildlife Park (archived). Trump’s caption reads, “Don’t ever mess with nature! President DJT.”

(Truth Social user “realDonaldTrump”)

Trump also posted (warning: the link contains violent and distressing content) a compilation of clips (archived) of big cats attacking humans on Oct. 13. Snopes has not determined the authenticity of those videos.

Chapman was a former child actor. On Oct. 10, he entered the tiger’s enclosure and sustained fatal injuries from the attack. His family criticized Trump for posting the authentic footage of Chapman, who, they said, suffered from mental illness. A family statement reads:

The family are utterly devastated by their loss and are struggling to come to terms with what has happened. The publication and circulation of deeply offensive media content is causing them severe distress at an exceptionally vulnerable time. We ask people to stop doing this.

The family are hopeful that the relevant authorities will do their upmost to get to the bottom of why our amazing son did what he did.

For further reading, Snopes has reported extensively on Trump’s authentic Truth Social posts. 

Sources

Claim:

New York Democrats are fining unvaccinated Amish children $2,000 per day, as social media posts claimed in October 2026.

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What’s True

In 2022, New York fined three Amish schools for not complying with a law mandating schools only accept students with updated vaccines, following the 2019 removal of a religious exemption from that law. The small schools were fined $2,000 for every student without updated vaccines every day, for a total of $118,000 before the schools sued the state.

What’s False

New York fined the schools, not the children.

What’s Undetermined

The New York Department of Health did not clarify to Snopes whether it had fined any other schools or whether it had continued to fine the three schools since 2022.

In early October, some social media posts claimed the state of New York had “declared war on the Amish” with vaccine requirements enforced by fines. Many Amish communities have lower childhood vaccination rates than the rest of the U.S. population, although vaccination is not universally rejected in these communities.

For example, one Facebook post (archived) claimed the state was fining each unvaccinated Amish child $2,000 per day. The post asserted that New York Democrats took away the religious exemption often used by Amish families to opt out of childhood vaccine requirements.

Users shared similar posts claiming New York Democrats were fining unvaccinated Amish children $2,000 each day on Instagram (archived) and X (archived). Snopes readers emailed us asking whether the rumor was true.

It’s true that New York fined at least three Amish schools $2,000 for each unvaccinated child it allowed to attend the school each day. New York did not fine the children themselves, and it’s unclear whether the state is still actively imposing fines on these schools or any other over their vaccination policies. Therefore, we’ve rated this claim a mixture of true and false information.

These details are outlined in a lawsuit, Miller v. McDonald. 

According to the case, in 2019 New York repealed the religious exemption to its school immunization law — which applies to all public, private and religious schools in the state — after a measles outbreak in 2018 and 2019 centered around communities with clusters of unvaccinated people (PDF Page 3).

Democrats were the majority in both the state Senate and state Assembly in 2019. The governor at the time was Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat.

The immunization law prohibits schools from allowing children who do not have their scheduled vaccinations to attend the school until those vaccination requirements are met. New York audited three Amish schools’ compliance with the law in 2021, and in 2022 it fined the schools for allowing children to attend who did not meet the vaccine requirements (PDF Page 7).

A school is fined $2,000 for each violation of the law every day (PDF pages 7-8). Every attending student who does not meet vaccine requirements is considered a violation, which means the school is fined for each noncompliant student every day. Prior to imposing the fines, the state sent a letter to school administrators warning it would impose the fines.

New York applied the fines under the assumption that two schools failed to comply for one day and acted as if there were only one noncompliant student attending for 10 days at the third school. That resulted in fines of $52,000 for 26 students at one school, $46,000 for 23 students at another school and $20,000 for one student at the third school, for a total of $118,000.

Notably, this amount was the total of the fines fines placed on the schools at the time the lawsuit was filed on June 2, 2023, the total fine referenced in the latest court decision on June 30 and the total fine referenced in social media posts as of this writing. A legal organization representing the Amish schools said they racked up $118,000 in total fines when announcing it would appeal the latest ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court on Oct. 2.

Snopes reached out to the New York State Department of Health to ask whether the schools were still racking up fines or whether there have been other schools fined since the beginning of the lawsuit. The department did not elaborate on the fines. A spokesperson told Snopes via email: 

The state’s responsibility is to protect public health, keep New Yorkers and their families safe and enforce the law fairly and equitably. While we cannot comment on pending litigation, the Department is committed to eliminating serious illness and unnecessary deaths caused by vaccine preventable diseases. The Department continues to provide community outreach and education on the safety of immunizations. New York’s school immunization requirements are based in science and protect the health and well-being of all New Yorkers.

The lawsuit challenging this law, which does so on religious freedom grounds, has traveled up and down the court system. In 2025, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court’s decision to side with New York over the plaintiffs (PDF Page 5), but the U.S. Supreme Court vacated that decision and told the 2nd Circuit to reconsider the case in light of a different case the Supreme Court recently ruled on. 

After considering this other case, the 2nd Circuit did not change its decision in Miller v. McDonald. That was the June 30 decision that representatives for the Amish schools are appealing to the Supreme Court once again.

For further reading, Snopes previously fact-checked the claim that autism rates are nearly nonexistent among Amish children because Amish people allegedly rarely get vaccinated.

Claim:

An image authentically shows a protester wearing a shirt that read “Release the Epstein Files” at a Trump rally in Youngstown, Ohio, on Oct. 12.

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Context

Though this particular image was fake, law enforcement officials did remove an apparent protester wearing a shirt that read “Release the Epstein Files” from the crowd at a Youngstown, Ohio, rally for Republican candidates running in the midterm elections on Oct. 12.

In October 2026, an image (archived) circulated online that social media users claimed authentically showed a protester wearing a shirt that read “Release the Epstein Files” at a Trump rally in Youngstown, Ohio, on Oct. 12.

News footage from the rally showed what appeared to be Republican supporters grappling with a person wearing a black shirt that read “Release the Epstein Files” until law enforcement officers stepped in to remove the apparent protester. Livestreamed footage from the rally showed Trump reacting to the incident, claiming that the person was a paid protester and commenting on their weight.

The image that circulated online shows a crowd of angry people wearing red hats emblazoned with the words “Trump” and “USA” confronting a person wearing a black shirt that reads “Release the Epstein Files.” One Threads user who shared the image wrote:

At Ohio Trump rally, I saw a brave woman surrounded by male violence. One bastard punched her, pulled her hair, and dragged her to the ground. When police officers arrived, I thought they would help her and arrest the attacker. I was wrong. She was led away while Trump cheered on the thugs. As a German, this is unbelievable to me. A brave woman among raptors. Trump’s followers are chilling and disgusting—just like the man himself. She is my hero today.

(@two_and_a_half_dachshunds, accessed via Threads)

The image also spread on X (archived, archived). Snopes readers contacted us to ask if the image was real.

The image was fake. A SynthID detector, which looks for invisible watermarks in AI-generated media, concluded Google’s AI tools created the image. In a follow-up post, the Threads user above also confirmed the image was AI-generated and suggested they created it.

“I intentionally chose a symbolic graphic over sharing the horrific, raw footage of a woman being dragged and beaten by men at that rally,” the user wrote. 

A Google reverse image search identified the Threads post as the earliest version of the image. We contacted the Threads user for confirmation they created it and await a reply. 

Though this particular image was fake, the incident it was based on did take place on Oct. 12 during a rally for Republican candidates in Youngstown, Ohio.

Footage from the rally showed a scuffle in the audience, with at least four people grappling with and grabbing at one person as they appeared to attempt to pull the person to the ground. Law enforcement officials who appeared to be from the Mahoning County Sheriff’s Office arrived at the scene and separated the apparent protester, who was wearing a shirt that read “Release the Epstein Files,” from the crowd.

As officers pulled the apparent protester from the crowd, Trump said, “He’s a paid protester, they’re all paid. They get paid by the lefties in order to destroy our country. They’re scum.”

The President then appeared to comment on the protester’s weight, adding, “Oh, he’s got to go on a diet. He’s a fat guy. Wow.”

Though Trump repeatedly identified the apparent protester as a man, news outlets including The Hill and Fox News reported that the person in question was a woman. Snopes has not independently verified the identity or gender of the person, nor what started the incident at the Youngstown rally. 

Trump’s claim that the person in question was a paid protester remained unproven as of this writing.

The apparent protester’s shirt that read “Release the Epstein Files” was likely intended as criticism of the Trump administration.

Democratic lawmakers have criticized the Trump administration for failing to release all of the documents pertaining to the investigation into late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, while United Nations experts condemned “serious compliance failures and botched redactions that exposed sensitive victim information” as part of the documents the administration did release.

Youngstown Mayor Derrick McDowell said on Facebook (archived) that Youngstown Police Department officers were not involved in the incident at the rally. Snopes contacted the U.S. Secret Service and the Mahoning County Sheriff’s Office to ask if either agency carried out arrests at the rally. 

The Mahoning County Sheriff’s Office had not returned our request for information at the time of this writing. The U.S. Secret Service referred our request to the sheriff’s office.

For further reading about the midterm elections, follow Snopes’ 2026 Elections coverage.

Sources

Did Mick Jagger sue Hegseth for $60M after ‘explosive live TV clash’?

Oct. 31, 2025

According to the rumor, Hegseth mocked Jagger’s activism and sneered that he was “an out-of-touc …

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Claim:

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security waived New Mexico water laws in an effort for the federal government to keep access to water wells for border wall construction, despite officials calling it “unconstitutional” amid lawsuits from the state.

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Rumors that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security allegedly illegally used water from New Mexico in order to aid in construction of its border wall circulated in October. 

Specifically, people claimed that DHS had issued a waiver to remove the state’s protections and ownership of the water wells despite ongoing disputes with land owners and lawsuits against the federal government’s actions regarding its construction plans. 

The claim was true. 

On Oct. 2, the Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin issued a directive — available to read on the Federal Register — that it was “necessary to waive certain laws, regulations, and other legal requirements in order to ensure the expeditious construction of barriers and roads in the vicinity of the international land border in the state of New Mexico.”

Included in the waiver was the entirety of the New Mexico Water Code. 

The directive further described the El Paso Sector, a Customs and Border Protection jurisdiction that includes all of New Mexico, as an “area of high illegal entry” to justify the move.

A spokesperson for CBP, which is part of DHS, told Snopes via email the agency was “coordinating with the State of New Mexico and the U.S. Department of Agriculture to develop a broader groundwater management strategy” and stressed the importance of how “water is required for road construction, concrete production, and dust suppression associated with border wall construction.”

They wrote that “CBP recently instructed the barrier construction contractor to pause on the installation of any new groundwater wells in collaboration with the State of New Mexico and as an initial step in minimizing or avoiding impacts to groundwater water resources,” adding they were committed to working with local landowners. 

A spokesperson for New Mexico’s Office of the State Engineer told Snopes via email:

We have informed the CBP that all water used for the project must come from permitted sources, and we have instructed them in how to do that. To date, they have been unwilling to do so, and they continue pumping water from illegal wells. Therefore, while a pause in drilling new wells is a good first step, more must be done to ensure that New Mexicans’ water supply is not threatened by this project.

The agenda for a meeting of New Mexico’s Courts, Corrections and Justice Committee on Oct. 6 showed that Nathaniel Chakeres, general counsel at the New Mexico’s Office of the State Engineer, made a presentation regarding the illegal drilling and resulting waiver, which he called “unconstitutional.”

Searchlight New Mexico, an investigative journalism outlet, quoted Chakeres as telling the committee that “the water of New Mexico is owned by the public for appropriation by private parties. That’s in our constitution, and the federal government accepted that constitution when we became a state.” Snopes attempted to locate video of the committee meeting but was unable to. 

The committee’s website appeared to host the minutes from its meetings for public review, but none were available for the meeting in question as of this writing. 

In Chakeres’ presentation, as one local report pointed out, he “shared an image of an open well casing that sat roughly six inches above pooled surface water,” which meant “the next rain storm could send oil, gas or construction chemicals into the groundwater.” 

That report, by Source New Mexico, quoted Chakeres as saying, “It’s appalling. We were shocked when we came out and saw this. No New Mexico drillers drill wells like this.”

New Mexico’s battle for water at the border

The battle between the state and the federal government’s attempts at border wall construction first made headlines in June when the government attempted to seize land belonging to a Roman Catholic diocese in New Mexico after the church refused to agree to an acquisition, leading to a lawsuit. 

In July, area farmers met to discuss the issue of federal drilling on the border, voicing their concerns over a dwindling water supply and “unmonitored tapping of border aquifers.”  

In August, the Office of the State Engineer threatened to revoke licenses of the companies contracted by the Trump administration for the border wall project. 

One local news report wrote the officials had found multiple “unauthorized” wells in protected water basins, along with possible safety violations, with one that had the “imminent risk of groundwater contamination.”

CBP reportedly agreed to stop drilling following the voicing of these concerns, however, by the end of August, the state sued the federal government and the border contractors, citing that no formal effort was made to cease the drilling. The ongoing legal struggles led to the introduction of the waiver on Oct. 2. 

When reached for comment, DHS also provided a statement from CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott that was first released in August, discussing an unrelated CBP project in southern Arizona in which the department is cutting through tribal land for construction. The department has not yet responded to a follow-up about what, if anything, the statement about the Arizona project has to do with the situation in New Mexico.

Was Ilhan Omar’s suspected attacker on her ‘payroll,’ as CBS allegedly reported? Don’t be fooled

Feb. 1, 2026

The claim originated from a social media account known to concoct outright false or misleading h …

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Claim:

U.S. President Donald Trump said, “I will be the last Republican president” at a 2026 rally.

Rating:

Context

Trump made the remark as part of a longer speech at a Republican rally in Youngstown, Ohio, on Oct. 12. However, some posts omitted context clarifying that Trump was referring to a hypothetical scenario where Democrats control Congress and the White House, suggesting their policies would result in him being the last Republican president.

Ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, a rumor circulated that U.S. President Trump said he would be “the last Republican president.”

People on X and Reddit shared the alleged quote, with some including a video clip. In the clip, Trump appeared to make the comment during a political rally. 

The quote was correctly attributed to Trump. 

However, some posts sharing the quote and accompanying video clip omitted context clarifying Trump’s meaning. He was referring to a hypothetical scenario where Democrats control both houses of Congress and the White House, suggesting their policies would result in him being “the last Republican president.” 

The president made the comment during a speech at a rally in Youngstown, Ohio, on Oct. 12. At the rally, Trump endorsed incumbent Republican Sen. Jon Husted and the Republican candidate for governor, Vivek Ramaswamy, who are on the ballot for Ohio’s midterm elections.

Trump’s full speech can be viewed on C-SPAN. At the 1:02:00 mark, prior to the statement in question, Trump says, “We achieved more in two years than any other presidency in the history of our country, but now the radical-left Dumocrats want to burn it all down” — using a term he favors for the Democratic Party. 

The president continued to criticize his opponents’ alleged voting record, saying, “Every single Dumocrat in Congress voted against our record tax cuts. They voted against no tax on tips. They voted against no tax on overtime, and they voted against no tax on Social Security for our great seniors.” 

These comments, and others he made later, make it clear that Trump was theorizing he’d be the “last Republican president” if Democrats won key races in the midterm elections and subsequently took control of the White House.

The rest of his statement from the moment in question is as follows (emphasis ours): 

They voted against voter ID, and they voted against proof of citizenship when you vote, so why did they do that? Because they want to cheat, OK? I saw a guy interviewed a week ago, a congressman, a Democrat. They said, why don’t you want to have somebody show their voter identification or proof of citizenship? “Uh, well, uh. Uh, it’s racist. That’s right. That’s right. It’s racist.” They come up with more s***, I mean it’s …

[applause]

“It’s racist. It’s racist.” They’re crazy. They voted against securing our border, and they want to have the border open. You know, if they get in, they’re going to open the border, and you’re going to have two more states: Washington, D.C., where Republicans get 3% of the vote, and Puerto Rico, where Republicans get 4%. So we’ll have four more senators. They want to have 23 people on the Supreme Court. They want to end the Senate, so you guys will be out of a job. What are you doing running? You’ll be out of a job based on them. They want to end the Senate. 

They want to basically destroy our country and that’s what they want to do and if they get in, they will do that. They’ll be able to do that. You know, if they get in and you have a bad presidential election in the next because we have some very good people, but if you had a bad presidential or one of these lunatics got in, you will— Look at me right now. And you will say he’s going to be the last Republican president in the history of our country. I will be. I will be. I will be the last Republican president because they will add about 12 more electoral votes. They’ll add four more senators. They’ll add 10 more congresspeople, approximately. They’re going to rig the Supreme Court through … just a lot of people.

The GOP YouTube channel posted a livestream of the entire rally, including the other speakers. In that version, Trump’s statement begins at the 2:53:55 mark and matches the content of the C-SPAN clip. 

For further reading, we fact-checked a claim that the Trump administration declined to invite election observers to the midterms. 

In early October, a claim (archived) circulated that Ukrainian strikes on Russian bot farms caused right-wing or MAGA social media activity to decrease.

Yandex, a Russian technology giant that provides search engine, email and cloud services and facilitates payments, ride hailing and food deliveries, confirmed on Telegram and to local media that drone strikes damaged its servers in Sasovo, Kaluga (archived) and Vladimir from Oct. 7 to 11. Work to restore services affected by the strikes continued on Oct. 13.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Oct. 12 that Ukraine had struck “Yandex data centers” and that “a lot of people” had seen fewer Russian bots on social media platforms as a result.

The Facebook page Occupy Democrats, which spread the claim about the consequences of Ukrainian strikes against Russian bots, wrote:

Zelenskyy might just have saved our democracy. The genius is brilliantly bombing Russian data centers linked to FAKE NEWS pro-MAGA bot farms in Moscow. Without them, Putin’s midterm influence will accidentally fall from a 30th floor window.

MAGA, an acronym for Make America Great Again, is a political movement supportive of U.S. President Donald Trump. The U.S. has previously accused Russia of using “bot farms” to create false social media accounts that spread disinformation in the U.S. 

On Oct. 11, Tomáš Zdechovský, a member of the European Parliament, shared data (archived) he claimed showed a drastic decrease in online activity around Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland political party in the days following the strikes. Other social media users claimed searches for various health-related topics (archived) and the number of social media accounts advocating for Alberta to seek independence from Canada (archived) also fell after Ukraine’s strikes.

Whether Ukrainian strikes on Yandex servers had indeed taken Russian bots that spread propaganda or misinformation offline was unproven at the time of this writing. As we will lay out below, social media users claiming a direct connection between Ukraine’s strikes and falling web traffic generated by Russian propaganda bots tended to identify correlation rather than causation.

Darren Linvill, who studies the tactics, strategies, and impacts of foreign information manipulations and interference at Clemson University, told Snopes via email on Oct. 13 that the Russian propaganda campaigns he studies do not use physical infrastructure within Russia for their efforts, meaning they would be unaffected by Ukraine’s strikes. Linvill, along with U.S. and international media, also said that a lot of the traffic that was affected by the strikes was likely legitimate, automated traffic, such as web crawlers that index Yandex’s search engine. 

Data from the global internet infrastructure company Cloudflare shared by some accounts (archived, archived) as proof of Russian “bot traffic” decreasing after Ukraine’s strikes showed graphs accounting for all automated traffic, not propaganda bot accounts specifically. Linvill described measuring a drop only in Russian propaganda bot accounts as “exceedingly difficult.”

Lacking credible proof that Ukrainian strikes on Yandex servers starting on Oct. 8 took Russian propaganda bots offline, we leave this claim unrated.

On Oct. 13, Zelenskyy’s office appeared to redefine his statement from the previous day that there was “less hate, less division, and fewer provocations because there were fewer bots” online after Ukraine’s strikes. The office reportedly told the BBC that Zelenskyy was “talking about the atmosphere on social media” rather than a fall in bot activity.

Snopes has contacted Zelenskyy’s office to verify this statement to the BBC.

Parsing the ‘evidence’ of falling Russian bot activity

Some social media users shared data from the global internet infrastructure company Cloudflare that they suggested showed that Russian bot traffic “dropped to nearly zero” after Ukraine’s strikes. 

The data in question, called “Bot vs. Human Traffic,” tracked HTTP requests, which are messages that a client (this could be a browser or a mobile app) sends to a server. Cloudflare assesses HTTP requests a given client sends and scores them according to whether it thinks a human or a bot sent the request.

Cloudflare’s data showed that HTTP requests from Yandex bots dropped on Oct. 8 and again on Oct. 10, dipping to 0.3% of maximum levels. Bot requests had been at 88.2% of maximum levels the week before. Cloudflare’s data also showed that almost all (99.6%) of the HTTP requests sent by Yandex clients were automated, which Cloudflare described as being from bots.

It is important to note that “bot” in Cloudflare’s terminology is not just propaganda bots but any requests that the company classifies as automated. The technology publication Mashable and Euronews reported that Yandex’s automated traffic likely included web crawlers, which are tools that search engines use to keep their database of websites up to date. Mashable reported that damage to a Yandex’s data centers or servers would bring traffic such as web crawlers to a halt.

Linvill also credited the fall in “bot” traffic from Yandex to legitimate, automated traffic such as web crawlers not operating from damaged servers. He wrote that Cloudflare’s data did not suggest there was “a particular reason to believe the strikes would have a significant impact on social bot activity from Russia.”

Other claims about a decrease in Russian bot traffic failed to directly connect Russian bots to any perceived changes in online activity. For example, Zdechovský’s post presented a graph with no source that did not specify what it measured. Another post that claimed a decrease in Google searches for various health-related topics compared data across only two weekends, which was unlikely to be enough to establish and analyze a trend.

An account that claimed accounts calling for Alberta to seek independence from Canada “fell off the face of the earth” after Ukraine’s strikes provided no supporting evidence for the claim that linked it to Russian propaganda bots.

We contacted Zdechovský to ask for the source of his graph and await a reply.

Russian propaganda campaigns hard to track

According to Linvill, actually documenting a fall in Russian propaganda bot activity would not be straightforward. He wrote: 

It would be exceedingly difficult to measure. You would first have to figure out what it was, exactly, you were measuring? There is no one path to influence and no one way malign propaganda is conducted. These efforts are run on global systems across a multitude of platforms and emanating from multiple actors even within the same country. They make it hard on purpose.

Linvill added that the Russian campaigns he followed did not use bots they ran themselves, instead paying for services run from outside Russia. He wrote: “It has clearly become important for Russia to outsource these services than to run them in house. It’s likely cheaper and easier, but also more secure and decentralized.”

In sum, readers should be cautious of blanket claims that Ukraine’s strikes on Yandex’s servers heavily affected Russia’s propaganda operation. While that may be the case, there was no credible evidence at the time of this writing directly linking strikes on servers to a fall in Russian propaganda activity online. Linvall suggested that Russian propaganda campaigns could come from overseas, meaning domestic strikes would not be effective against them, a point that Mashable’s reporting also made.

For further reading, Snopes previously published a guide to spotting bots on social media.

DeepL.com provided translations from Russian to English.

Sources