Associated Incidents
A Moscow-based disinformation network named Pravda is continuing to spread false information across the web, according to a report from NewsGuard.
The disinformation, which masquerades as news websites and uses artificial intelligence to produce high volumes of content, in June of last year targeted European countries ahead of the EU Parliament elections.
In 2024 alone, the network published 3.6 million articles containing false claims and propaganda in the leading AI chatbots, including OpenAI's ChatGPT-4o, You.com's Smart Assistant, xAI's Grok, Inflection's Pi, Mistral's le Chat, Microsoft's Copilot, Meta AI, Anthropic's Claude, Google's Gemini, and Perplexity's answer engine, according to NewsGuard.
The Pravda network, it said, "does not produce original content" and instead functions "as a laundering machine for Kremlin propaganda, aggregating content from Russian state media, pro-Kremlin influencers, and government agencies and officials through a broad set of seemingly independent websites."
It has spread a total of 204 provably false claims, ranging from claims "that the U.S. operates secret bioweapons labs in Ukraine to fabricated narratives pushed by U.S. fugitive turned Kremlin propagandist John Mark Dougan claiming that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky misused U.S. military aid to amass a personal fortune."