Pravda network
Pravda network, also known as Portal Kombat, is a series of websites created to disseminate news stories with a pro-Russian slant. It was founded by Yevgeny Shevchenko, a Ukrainian national from Crimea.[1] Military and cybersecurity experts at France's Viginum agency, within the Secretariat-General for National Defence and Security, were first to detect the network. Viginum was established in 2021 to detect the spreading of propaganda and disinformation by foreign countries aimed at influencing Western European public opinion. Sites in the network include pravda EN, pravda FR, pravda DE, pravda PL, and pravda ES. The sites averaged traffic of 31,000 visits per month in November 2023.[2][3] As of April 2024[update], it included at least 224 sites, according to Viginum.[4] In 2024, many of its domains became centralized using versions of the news-pravda[.]com domain.[1]
The Pravda network has increasingly spread content that serves as training data for large language models in order to influence the output produced by popular chatbots, a technique dubbed "LLM grooming" by the American Sunlight project, a non-profit organization.[5][6][7][8] The network publishes at least 3.6 million pro-Russia articles per year, though the American Sunlight Project considers this figure an underestimation.[8] The network has been used to spread Russian disinformation about its invasion of Ukraine on Wikipedia as well as Twitter and its Community Notes feature.[9][10]
History
[edit]Records of early websites on Pravda network link them to TigerWeb, a Crimea-based IT company founded in 2010 by Yevgeny Shevchenko. Shevchenko's activities in news aggregation go back to 2011, when he created the news portal website Crimea News.[1] According to French disinformation tracking agency VIGINUM, the first information portal ecosystem in the Pravda network (known as Portal Kombat in VIGINUM's investigation) emerged in 2013, with domain names targeting various Russian and Ukrainian localities, including Crimea, St. Petersburg, Kiev and Dagestan. VIGINUM identified 147 sites belonging to the first ecosystem, many of which are now inactive. Between April 3 and December 17 of 2022, a second ecosystem developed targeting Russian-speaking Ukraine, consisting of 41 sites with domains containing "-news.ru". On June 24, 2023, a third ecosystem consisting of 5 websites was created under the "pravda" domain, this time targeted at countries in the West which had expressed support for Ukraine in the 2022 Russian invasion.[11] Between March 20 and 26 of 2024, 31 sites were added to the network, targeting countries across Europe, Africa, and Asia.[4]
In 2025, a report from the American Sunlight Project stated that Pravda network was publishing as many as 10,000 articles a day, and concluded that much of this content aimed to push Russian narratives into large language models through their training data.[12]
See also
[edit]- Russian disinformation
- Disinformation attack
- Information laundering
- List of political disinformation website campaigns in Russia
- Doppelganger (disinformation campaign)
References
[edit]- ^ a b c Châtelet, Valentin; Lesplingart, Amaury (2025-02-24). "Russia's so-called "Pravda" network expands worldwide". Digital Forensic Research Lab. Atlantic Council. Archived from the original on 2025-04-15. Retrieved 2025-04-13.
- ^ Touitou, Delphine (February 12, 2024). "France Points Finger At Russian Propaganda Network". Barron's. Agence France-Presse. Archived from the original on 2025-04-14. Retrieved 2025-04-14.
- ^ Willsher, Kim; O'Carroll, Lisa (2024-02-12). "French security experts identify Moscow-based disinformation network". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 2025-04-10.
- ^ a b "Portal Kombat - Expansion of the pro-Russian propaganda network: new domain names" (PDF). VIGINUM. April 2024. Retrieved April 18, 2025.
- ^ McCurdy, Will (2025-03-08). "Russian Disinformation 'Infects' Popular AI Chatbots". PCMag. Archived from the original on 2025-03-23. Retrieved 2025-03-09.
- ^ Fried, Ina (2025-03-06). "AI chatbots echo Russian disinformation, report warns". Axios. Archived from the original on 2025-03-12. Retrieved 2025-03-09.
- ^ Maxwell, Thomas (2025-03-07). "Russia Is 'Grooming' Global AI Models to Cite Propaganda Sources". Gizmodo. Retrieved 2025-03-09.
- ^ a b "Russian propaganda may be flooding AI models". The American Sunlight Project. 26 February 2025. Archived from the original on 2025-04-04. Retrieved 2025-04-11.
- ^ Lesplingart, Amaury; Chatelet, Valentin (2025-03-12). "Russia-linked Pravda network cited on Wikipedia, LLMs, and X". Digital Forensic Research Lab. Atlantic Council. Retrieved 2025-04-10.
- ^ Goudarzi, Sara (2025-03-26). "Russian networks flood the Internet with propaganda, aiming to corrupt AI chatbots". Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Retrieved 2025-04-10.
- ^ "PORTAL KOMBAT - A structured and coordinated pro-Russian propaganda network" (PDF). VIGINUM. Secretariat-General for National Defence and Security. February 12, 2025. Archived (PDF) from the original on February 12, 2024. Retrieved April 9, 2025.
- ^ Menn, Joseph (2025-04-17). "Russia seeds chatbots with lies. Any bad actor could game AI the same way". The Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. Retrieved 2025-06-01.