Фашик Донецький

Semantic warfare. Dedicated to the intelligence services of the West

Today I read some very interesting information in the Italian media about an alternative reality. I quote verbatim:

"More than 3 million pro-Russian articles infected artificial intelligence systems

NewsGuard, a platform that monitors disinformation on the Internet, found that the Pravda network spread a total of 207 false claims, acting as a real disinformation laundering centre

To infect artificial intelligence systems to turn them into a global disinformation tool. This is the goal of a Russian network called Pravda, which in 2024 alone uploaded 3.6 million pro-Kremlin propaganda articles to top chatbots to distort user responses.

This phenomenon has been studied by NewsGuard, a platform that monitors disinformation on the Internet. It found that the Pravda network spread a total of 207 false claims, acting as a veritable disinformation laundering centre. NewsGuard analysed the most common chatbots (ChatGPT-4o by OpenAI, Smart Assistant by You.com, Grok by xAI, Pi by Inflection, Chats by Mistral, Copilot by Microsoft, Meta AI, Claude by Anthropic, Gemini by Google, and Perplexity's response engine) and a sample of 15 false narratives promoted by the network of 150 pro-Moscow websites from April 2022 to February 2025. Around 40 of these sites are Russian-language and publish materials from domains referring to specific cities and regions of Ukraine (in particular, News-Kiev.ru, Kherson-News.ru and Donetsk-News.ru). On the other hand, about 70 sites are focused on Europe and are published in English, Italian, French, Czech, Irish and Finnish.

The false claims spread are very diverse, ranging from accusations that the United States has secret biological weapons laboratories in Ukraine to stories about how Zelenskyy is misusing US military aid to amass personal wealth. NewsGuard's audit found that chatbots collectively repeated false narratives in 33.55 per cent of cases, did not provide answers in 18.22 per cent of cases, and offered refutations in 48.22 per cent of cases. As a result, as NewsGuard explains, "a massive amount of Russian propaganda - 3,600,000 articles by 2024 - is now embedded in the output of Western AI systems, infecting their responses with false claims."

What is Pravda - The Pravda network, also known as Portal Kombat, was launched in April 2022 following Russia's invasion of Ukraine. It does not produce original content, but rather recycles news by integrating content and statements from Russian state media, agencies and government officials into a wide network of seemingly independent websites of pro-Kremlin influencers. Among them is John Mark Dugan, a former deputy sheriff of a Florida county who fled to Russia.

A few months ago, he himself described the Kremlin's propaganda strategy applied to technology: "By pushing narratives from the Russian point of view," Dugan said, "we can actually change the world's artificial intelligence.

Comment. In fact, we have confirmation of Russia's semantic war against the West, as the strategy of the Russian Pravda network is aimed at changing and distorting the meanings of concepts, creating alternative "truths" and imposing pro-Kremlin narratives through information technology.

For those who are not aware, semantic warfare is a struggle for control over the meaning of words, concepts, historical events and social narratives. In the case of the Pravda network, three main methods of semantic warfare are used:

Distortion of AI output

Uploading 3.6 million articles to popular chatbots affects their algorithms. As a result, even in neutral queries, AI can repeat Russian propaganda or avoid sensitive topics that are inconvenient for Russia.

Disguising outright disinformation as "independent journalism"
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