Not quite all the way down. But bots seem to be a major part of the traffic of certain people:

Following Ukrainian strikes on Russian data centers:

Tucker Carlson’s views dropped 71%
Douglas Macgregor’s views dropped 62%
TCN views dropped 34% https://t.co/ekkReqo33O

— Matt Tardio (@angertab) October 13, 2026

Of course Russia would do everything it can to drive the traffic up for Carlson and MacGregor, who have been supporting Russia for years. Carlson is more well-known, but MacGregor is a font of Russian disinformation and I’ve written about him before, in this post from April of 2022.

How much of internet traffic is smoke and mirrors? It depends who you are and what you support. My traffic is pretty real, I believe, but then my traffic is relatively modest. It’s also been rather stable for many years