<
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/03/17/automated-pravda-propaganda-network-retooled-to-embed-pro-russian-narratives-surreptitiously-in-popular-chatbots/>
"It’s no secret that Russia has taken advantage of the Internet’s global reach
and low distribution costs to flood the online world with huge quantities of
propaganda (as have other nations):
Techdirt has been writing about Putin’s
troll army for a decade now. Russian organizations like the Internet Research
Agency have been paying large numbers of people to write blog and social media
posts, comments on Web sites, create YouTube videos, and edit Wikipedia
entries, all pushing the Kremlin line, or undermining Russia’s adversaries
through hoaxes, smears and outright lies. But technology moves on, and
propaganda networks evolve too. The American Sunlight Project (ASP) has been
studying one of them in particular: Pravda (Russian for “truth”), a network of
sites that aggregate pro-Russian material produced elsewhere. Recently, ASP has
noted some significant changes there:
Over the past several months, ASP researchers have investigated 108 new
domains and subdomains belonging to the Pravda network, a
previously-established ecosystem of largely identical, automated web pages
that previously targeted many countries in Europe as well as Africa and Asia
with pro-Russia narratives about the war in Ukraine. ASP’s research, in
combination with that of other organizations, brings the total number of
associated domains and subdomains to 182. The network’s older targets
largely consisted of states belonging to or aligned with the West.
According to ASP:
The top objective of the network appears to be duplicating as much
pro-Russia content as widely as possible. With one click, a single article
could be autotranslated and autoshared with dozens of other sites that
appear to target hundreds of millions of people worldwide.
The quantity of material and the rate of posting on the Pravda network of sites
is notable. ASP estimates the overall publishing rate of the network is around
20,000 articles per 48 hours, or more than 3.6 million articles per year. You
would expect a propaganda network to take advantage of automation to boost its
raw numbers. But ASP has noticed something odd about these new Web pages: “The
network is unfriendly to human users; sites within the network boast no search
function, poor formatting, and unreliable scrolling, among other usability
issues.”
There are obvious benefits from flooding the Internet with pro-Russia material,
and creating an illusory truth effect through the apparent existence of
corroborating sources across multiple sites. But ASP suggests there may be
another reason for the latest iteration of the Pravda propaganda network:
Because of the network’s vast, rapidly growing size and its numerous quality
issues impeding human use of its sites, ASP assesses that the most likely
intended audience of the Pravda network is not human users, but automated
ones. The network and the information operations model it is built on
emphasizes the mass production and duplication of preferred narratives
across numerous platforms (e.g. sites, social media accounts) on the
internet, likely to attract entities such as search engine web crawlers and
scraping algorithms used to build LLMs [large language models] and other
datasets. The malign addition of vast quantities of pro-Russia propaganda
into LLMs, for example, could deeply impact the architecture of the post-AI
internet. ASP is calling this technique LLM grooming."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
