Anti-Israel hashtags plunge after Ukraine strikes Russian servers

Did a Ukrainian attack on Russian computing infrastructure cause a dramatic shift in social-media discourse? A user named Ohio Rob posted graphs on X on 11 October 2026 from the monitoring system X Radar, showing that use of the phrases "Free Palestine" and "genocide" had dropped, while mentions of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky spiked sharply.

In his post, Ohio Rob asked whether other users had noticed the phenomenon, and raised the possibility that Russian bot accounts were being silenced or disconnected from the network following damage to computing infrastructure.

The graph he presented showed a sharp jump in mentions of Zelensky, reaching around 688,000, while phrases associated with pro-Palestinian discourse showed a downward trend.

The attack began on the night between 7 and 8 October 2026, when Ukrainian drones struck the server farms of Russian tech giant Yandex in the city of Sasovo in Ryazan Oblast.

On 9 October, another data centre was attacked in Kaluga Oblast, and on the night between 10 and 11 October a third centre was hit in Vladimir Oblast. The strikes caused computing systems to shut down and disrupted digital services across Russia.

Ukrainian strike on Russian server farm (Photo: social media)

The post drew attention in Israel as well. Channel 12 news commentator Amit Segal shared the image and wrote: "One of the wonders of the internet: according to this post, Ukraine attacked a Russian server farm. What happened immediately afterwards was a dramatic drop in the use of the phrases 'genocide' and 'Free Palestine' on the Twitter network."