Hundreds of English-language websites – ranging from mainstream news outlets to fringe blogs – are spreading disinformation on the Internet by linking to articles from pro-Kremlin networks, according to a study released by a London-based think tank.
The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) study found that in more than 80% of the citations analyzed, websites treated the network as a credible source, legitimizing its narratives and increasing its visibility. The disinformation operation – known as the Pravda Network – was identified by the French government last year.
The ISD warned that by linking to articles in the network, websites were inadvertently increasing the chances of appearing on search engines and large language model (LLM) pages, even in cases where the linking sites were disputing the Pravda Network as the source.
Security experts have expressed fears in recent months that Russia is trying to seed pro-Russian narratives by feeding large amounts of disinformation to chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini, a process called “LLM grooming.”
The Pravda Network has been in existence since 2014, but researchers tracking its output say the number of articles it publishes has increased this year. There were 23,000 articles published daily in May, up from about 6,000 daily articles in 2024.
It appears that the network is now aiming for a global audience, targeting countries in Asia and Africa as well as Europe.
“The Pravda network has been expanding rapidly over the past year,” said disinformation expert Nina Jankowicz, who spoke to the UK Parliament earlier this week on efforts to undermine democracy. “They’re targeting many different languages. They want to have a presence in different countries.”
It’s unclear what caused this increase, but some disinformation experts believe it was an effort to push large amounts of pro-Russian content into the training datasets of AI models, which use massive amounts of data during their training and scrape content from across the Internet.
Studies conducted earlier this year showed that popular chatbots repeatedly repeated Russian disinformation in response to certain questions, suggesting, for example, that the US was building a bioweapon in Ukraine or that the French were supplying mercenaries to Kiev.
The ISD researchers say that, whether LLM was poisoned or not, their findings indicate that 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 have saturated the Internet ecosystem enough to bring them to the forefront of real people who are researching Russia-related issues.”
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The ISD found that 40 percent of the Pravda Network’s content taken up by mainstream websites appeared to be related to Russia’s war in Ukraine. However, a large number were related to other topics: for example, US domestic policy, or the fortunes of Elon Musk. Along with appearing on news websites, Pravda articles have also appeared on social media.
Bodnar said, “This happened with many different reputable sources and also with a lot of less reputable sources, like people with different ideologies. It really affected every part of the web that we could find.”
Jankowicz warned that the growing legitimacy of the Pravda Network could allow it to “grab coverage” on Ukraine as media outlets increasingly shift their coverage elsewhere.
“There is less news about Ukraine. And if they can get there and fill that gap quickly, that means the Russian approach is one that will quickly get there and be cited in the larger language models.”