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Michael Tanton

@mtanton.bsky.social

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film and TV editor guy

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Michael Tanton

@mtanton.bsky.social

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June 16, 2025 at 12:17 PM

Reposted by Michael Tanton

Nina Jankowicz

@ninajankowicz.com

A pro-Russia content aggregation network is churning out at least 3 MILLION pieces of propaganda per year, all on sites that are virtually unusable by humans.

So what's the goal? We explore the idea that it might be to flood LLMs with pro-Russia content:
static1.squarespace.com/static/6612c... 1/

Executive Summary
A pro-Russia content aggregation network, Pravda, appears to be set up to flood large-language models with pro-Kremlin content, The American Sunlight Project has found.

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.

Notably, this latest expansion includes many countries in Africa, the Asia-Pacific, the Middle East, and North America. It also includes entities other than countries as targets, specifically non-sovereign nations, international organizations, audiences for specific languages, and prominent heads of state. 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.

ASP researchers also believe the network may have been custom-built to flood large language models (LLMs) with pro-Russia content. The network is unfriendly to human users; sites within the network boast no search function, poor formatting, and unreliable scrolling, among other usability issues. This final finding poses foundational implications for the intersection of disinformation and artificial intelligence (AI), which threaten to turbocharge highly automated, global information operations in the future.

February 27, 2025 at 1:49 PM

Reposted by Michael Tanton

Tech Won’t Save Us

@techwontsave.us

Sam Altman imagines a grand AI-powered future for humanity, but isn’t too concerned with what it might actually mean for average people.

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