Hundreds of English-language websites link to pro-Kremlin propaganda

Original article by Aisha Down

Hundreds of English-language websites – from mainstream news outlets to fringe blogs – are linking to articles from a pro-Kremlin network flooding the internet with disinformation, according to a study released by a London-based thinktank.

The study by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) found that in more than 80% of citations it analysed, the websites treated the network as a credible source, legitimising its narratives and increasing its visibility. The disinformation operation – known as the Pravda network – was identified by the French government last year.

The ISD cautioned that by linking to articles in the network, the websites were inadvertently increasing the likelihood of search engines and large language models (LLMs) surfacing the pages, even in cases where the linking sites were disputing the Pravda network as a source.

Security experts have expressed fears in recent months that Russia is trying to seed chatbots such as ChatGPT and Gemini with pro-Russia narratives by feeding them large volumes of disinformation, a process called “LLM grooming”.

The Pravda network has been around since 2014, but researchers tracking its output say the number of articles it churns out has surged this year. Up to 23,000 articles a day were published in May, up from approximately 6,000 daily articles in 2024.

The network now appears to be aiming for a global audience, targeting countries across Asia and Africa as well as Europe.

“The Pravda network has been expanding pretty rapidly over the past year,” said Nina Jankowicz, a disinformation expert who spoke to the UK parliament earlier this week on efforts to undermine democracy. “They are targeting a lot of different languages. They want to have a presence across a bunch of different countries.”

It is unclear what led to this increase, but some disinformation experts believe it was an effort to push large amounts of pro-Russia content into the training datasets of AI models, which use massive amounts of data during their training and scrape content from the entire internet.

Studies from earlier this year showed that popular chatbots at times repeated Russian disinformation in response to certain queries – suggesting, for example, that the US was building a bioweapon in Ukraine or the French were supplying mercenaries to Kyiv.

Researchers at the ISD say that, whether or not LLMs have been poisoned, their findings indicate the Pravda network’s high-volume strategy is working.

“More than any other Russia-aligned operation, the Pravda network is playing a numbers game,” said Joseph Bodnar, a senior researcher at the ISD. “They’ve saturated the internet ecosystem enough to get in front of real people who are doing research on Russia-related issues.”

The ISD found that 40% of the Pravda network content picked up by mainstream websites appeared to be related to Russia’s war in Ukraine. A vast amount, however, concerned other topics: US domestic policy, for example, or the fortunes of Elon Musk. As well as surfacing on news websites, the Pravda articles have also appeared on social media.

“This happened to a lot of different reputable sources and a lot less reputable sources too, like people from across the ideological spectrum. It really touched every part of the web that we could find,” said Bodnar.

Jankowicz warned that the Pravda network’s increasing legitimacy might allow it to “usurp coverage” on Ukraine as media outlets increasingly shift their coverage elsewhere.

“There’s a bit less news about Ukraine. And if they can get in there and fill that gap really soon, that means that the Russian viewpoint is the one that’s going to get out there quickly and be cited in large language models.”