Researchers say Russia-aligned Pravda network is engaging in “LLM grooming”, flooding the internet with disinformation to influence chatbots like ChatGPT
Thinktank says internet flooded with disinformation by Russia-aligned Pravda network, which many websites treat as credible Bluesky: @ruudhendriks68 , @eugenemcparland , and @hhesterm . Mastodon: @mothninja@beige.party Forums: r/technology and r/europe See also Mediagazer Bluesky: Ruud Hendriks / @ruudhendriks68 : The English-language internet is flooded with material from a pro-Kremlin network publishing up to 23,000 articles a day. Search and AI sites are sucking it all up and sharing it. The propagandist's dream. (Dr. Ian Garner) Eugene McParland / @eugenemcparland : Hundreds of English-language websites link to pro-kremlin propaganda — Thinktank says internet flooded with disinformation by russia-aligned Pravda network, which many websites treat as credible — www.theguardian.com/world/2025/ n... Holger Hestermeyer / @hhesterm : Another similarity of LLMs to humans: if you expose them to a lot of disinformation, they will believe it. Which you can exploit, apparently called “LLM grooming”. So LLMs fail at three levels: /1 www.theguardian.com/world/2025/ n... Mastodon: Anna / @mothninja@beige.party : In case you somehow needed yet another reason to not use LLMs — “Security experts have expressed fears in recent months that Russia is trying to seed chatbots such as ChatGPT and Gemini with pro-Russia narratives by feeding them large volumes of disinformation, a process called “LLM grooming”.” … Forums: r/technology : Hundreds of English-language websites link to pro-Kremlin propaganda r/europe : Hundreds of English-language websites link to pro-Kremlin propaganda See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
This extends a documented shift in Russian propaganda distribution: when social platforms tightened enforcement, researchers reported a move into news-site comment sections in earlier efforts to exploit less-moderated publishing channels.
The risk to AI systems was already visible in a study finding chatbots repeated Russian disinformation; the Pravda allegations describe an attempt to scale the supply of source material those systems may encounter.
First-order effects
- Search and AI platforms ingesting or retrieving from the open web face a more acute source-quality problem: high-volume, interlinked Pravda material can appear alongside legitimate reporting and be surfaced to users.
- English-language sites that link to or treat Pravda content as credible can amplify the network beyond its own domains, obscuring the material's origin for readers and automated systems.
Second-order effects
- Model providers and search operators are pushed to strengthen provenance, domain-quality, and retrieval safeguards—not only evaluate a model's generated answer after the fact.
- The tactic raises the value of publisher reputation and source attribution in AI results, while creating a harder screening burden as the web accumulates industrial-scale synthetic and coordinated content.
Third-order effects
- If coordinated actors can reliably shape the public corpus that models retrieve from, AI trust and safety will increasingly depend on information-supply controls as well as model training safeguards.
- This points to an adversarial contest over the web's machine-readable knowledge base, where coordinated distribution networks may exploit gaps between platform moderation, web indexing, and AI citation practices.
The trend: Disinformation operations are shifting from influencing human audiences on social feeds to influencing the source environment that search and generative AI systems use to answer them.