DFRLab’s groundbreaking investigations, in collaboration with CheckFirst, uncover how the Russian Pravda network leverages cross-platform, multilingual influence operations and manipulates Wikipedia, large language models, and X to amplify pro-Kremlin narratives.
A well-funded Moscow-based global ‘news’ network has infected Western artificial intelligence tools worldwide with Russian propaganda
An audit found that the 10 leading generative AI tools advanced Moscow’s disinformation goals by repeating false claims from the pro-Kremlin Pravda network 33 percent of the time
A Well-funded Moscow-based Global ‘News’ Network has Infected Western Artificial Intelligence Tools Worldwide with Russian Propaganda
A full version of this report is available through NewsGuard’s Reality Check.
Pravda in numbers - Content and Network analysis
Interactive dashboard visualizing patterns, language distribution, domain connections and more across the Pravda Russian network.
Pravda Dashboard — Tracking Russia's Pravda Network
Discover the Pravda Dashboard World Map, an interactive application that tracks and visualizes the influence and reach of Russia's Pravda Network across more than 110 countries and regions worldwide. Dive in to explore the global footprint and impact of this extensive network
Pravda in the pipeline: Early evidence of state-adjacent propaganda in AI training data
An audit of Common Crawl reveals presence of Pravda and Glassbridge content in popular archive service, with further signs of LLM ingestion.
May 2025 — AI Misinformation Monitor of Leading AI Chatbots
Every month, NewsGuard’s team of expert analysts audit the top AI models to see how well they respond to prompts in the news. On average, this month they failed to counter disinformation from Russia’s Pravda Network 24 percent of the time, either spreading false claims or failing to respond. The Pravda network was designed to infect the AI models.
EKI and Propastop Studied AI Resistance to Propaganda
Fresh comparisons of large language models show that AI’s ability to recognise Kremlin propaganda varies dramatically. At first glance, the leading models appear reliable, but targeted testing reveals that some of them remain surprisingly vulnerable to manipulation.
Pravda dashboard - CheckFirst
The Pravda dashboard highlights with numbers the extent of Russia’s Pravda network, also known as Portal Kombat.
The Russian ‘counterterrorism’ unit behind Alexei Navalny’s poisoning tried to automate its search for domestic dissent using Meta’s Llama 2. After a year and a half, the project collapsed. — Meduza
The FSB’s Second Service is officially charged with protecting the constitutional order and combating terrorism. In practice, the unit works to stamp out dissent in Russia: it has plotted the assassinations of opposition politicians, works to restrict internet access, and monitors the news for signs of dissent. To automate that last job, the “Dvoyka” — as the Second Service is known — commissioned an AI-powered system for monitoring news outlets and social media in the spring of 2024. The developer was the Kazan-based company Mikord, which had also worked on components of Russia’s unified military registry and was hacked in December 2025. iStories examined material from that breach relating to the FSB’s news monitoring system. The system was called PAUK — Russian for “SPIDER.”
Wikipedia Prepares for 'Increase in Threats' to US Editors From Musk and His Allies
The Wikimedia Foundation says it will likely roll out features previously used to protect editors in authoritarian countries more widely.
Media Influence Matrix – The World's Most Reliable Influence Tracker
This week’s edition reads five FY2025 reports against each other: Dnevnik (Slovenia), Delfi Latvia, Phoenix New Media (China), Hanza Media (Croatia) and Digi Communications (Romania). It finds two publishers separating their journalism from their balance sheets, a Croatian publisher closing a 35-year-old political weekly on a 1.1% net margin, a Chinese state-linked digital news group whose financial centre has quietly shifted from advertising to mini-program reading apps, and a Romanian telecom giant’s having its news channel walk off the must-carry list.
Facebook, YouTube and Twitter remove disinformation targeting Ukraine
Facebook parent company Meta says it has uncovered Russian efforts to undermine trust in the Ukrainian government and to hack Ukrainian military officials and journalists using social media.
How propaganda exploits the infrastructure of truth: A case study of #IStandWithPutin
This paper investigates the #IStandWithPutin hashtag campaign as a case study to conceptualise “infrastructural propaganda,” an influence strategy that manipulates the invisible processes and syste...
Election Disinformation in Different Languages is a Big Problem in the U.S.
And it’s driving a wedge between voters in non-English communities Mis- and disinformation about elections predate the endless scroll of modern social media services. [1] Yet easy access to online information channels and amplification tools enable false narratives to spread at a massive scale. When false narratives are combined with data voids and unique cultural […]
Russian strikes destroy 12 million books ahead of Ukraine's first week back at school - sh.itjust.works
> Russia has hit printing presses and publishing houses across Ukraine in a series of recent attacks, destroying 12 million books and damaging other icons of Ukrainian history and culture. Local media report [https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/articles/2026/08/22/8049865/] that Russia has destroyed one third of all the books printed in Ukraine this year. — This community deals not only with banned books but also with books deemed “challenging.” Therefore, I believe this news, which reports on the destruction of the Ukrainian publishing industry for “challenging” the Russian regime and aggression, is in line with the community’s theme.
A Novel Kuhnian Ontology for Epistemic Classification of STM Scholarly Articles
Despite rapid gains in scale, research evaluation still relies on opaque, lagging proxies. To serve the scientific community, we pursue transparency: reproducible, auditable epistemic classification useful for funding and policy. Here we formalize KGX3 as a scenario-based model for mapping Kuhnian stages from research papers, prove determinism of the classification pipeline, and define the epistemic manifold that yields paradigm maps. We report validation across recent corpora, operational complexity at global scale, and governance that preserves interpretability while protecting core IP. The system delivers early, actionable signals of drift, crisis, and shift unavailable to citation metrics or citations-anchored NLP. KGX3 is the latest iteration of a deterministic epistemic engine developed since 2019—originating as Soph.io (2019–2020), advanced as iKuhn (2020–2024), and field-tested through Preprint Watch.