So it turns you can bomb data centers and make the world a better place.

Last week, Ukraine bombed three Yandex data centers in Russia. Subsequently, the amount of right-wing nonsense and bad-faith engagement on social media cratered.¹

The reduction in fascist bot activity is good news, but it also proves something we've long suspected and which makes me terminally angry: the Internet we grew up on is dead, and it was killed—on purpose—by the greediest people alive. They enclosed the digital commons² and then flooded it with their bots and their bullshit, because they think free speech not only means they have a right to speak, but that they have a right to be listened to.

The internet used to be fun, informative, and sometimes even democratizing, until organized harassment and industrial-scale fascist propaganda and relentless AI slop drowned out most of the human connections, and now we can’t trust anything because anyone could be a bot and any post could be AI and any perspective could be a political op. The internet just feels so fucking deceitful now, and everybody is trapped by network effects on the same handful of giant corporate platforms where we can’t even find each other because every algorithm fills our feeds with viral strangers instead.

This is what Dead Internet Theory looks like in practice. The bots are already coming back—software can be migrated to other infrastructure, and destroyed infrastructure can be rebuilt. And in the meantime, AI is still out here dumping fake slop all over the place at an industrial scale, all generated by different data centers that are far out of reach of Ukraine’s missiles.

It pisses me off to no end to say this, but: in 2026, you should probably assume a stranger’s account is a bot until it can be shown to be otherwise.

Here are some positive signals I look for to help determine whether an account likely has a real person behind it. Having two or more is ideal:

• You have seen or met them in person

• Someone else you already know and trust, trusts them

• They have verifiable public connections

• They have a consistent, long-term presence across multiple platforms

• They’ve provably spent money on their online presence³

And here are some negative signals that tend to make me think “yeah, you’re a bot”:

• Low account age + inflammatory content

• Replies that are totally irrelevant to the post they’re replying to, especially when paired with extremely low account age

• They follow a massive number of accounts while having very few followers themselves

• Exclusive dedication to a narrow topic and/or exclusively argumentative, with no history of other engagement

• They make lots of data harvesting posts, e.g. “your stripper name is your birth city + look up the first letter of your last name on this chart”

• Any behavior that would be disruptively bizarre in person

You may note that list could also describe trolls… and you’re right! Bots are often trolls, and trolls are only sometimes bots. But it turns out you can deal with them both the same way: block early, block often, and block without remorse.

Blocking is not a free speech issue. You’re not censoring them, you’re simply not giving their bullshit your own personal attention⁴. There is no moral dimension here, and you have zero responsibility to allow another account to inject their message into your brain, no matter what that message is.

(When you do this, some critics will accuse you of creating a filter bubble. Curiously, those critics are always invested in forcing their words into your eyeballs. Ask yourself why they care so much about being able to do that, and who actually benefits from that arrangement?)

The online brigades and the bot propagandists and the AI slop peddlers have destroyed the bonds of trust that hold a society together, and there is no punitive justice that can ever make up for the scale of that violence. Rebuilding that trust will be the work of generations, and none of us alive today are likely to see the fruits of that labor.

But we still have to do the work.

For a brief, shining moment while the bots were down, social media felt different, and it seems like everyone noticed. That has to be our north star.

P.S. Special thanks to the folks on Mastodon who helped me flesh out the list of likely bot flags, including the folks who thought I myself was a bot, which perfectly illustrates the social damage that’s been done here.

P.P.S. Last week’s missive discussed the announcement that the execution of Nidal Hassan would be livestreamed. Trump walked that back this week. Will this be the final decision, or are more flip-flops in store in the weeks to come? Stay tuned! 🤡