Seed & Deceive: When Russia Grooms the Machine
From North America to Ukraine, Kremlin content farms are turning propaganda into machine-made “truth.”
The Silent Breach
No brute force. No ransomware splash screen.
Instead, the attack slid under the radar, into the training data.
Russia’s propaganda apparatus, the Pravda network, didn’t bother chasing clicks. It wasn’t built for you. It was built for crawlers. Dozens of domains, thousands of articles, carefully tuned to look legitimate to a bot that can’t tell propaganda from policy paper.
And the result? You ask an AI assistant a geopolitical question, and it parrots back Moscow’s line. Not once. Not occasionally. One-third of the time.
From Troll Farms to Training Loops
The Kremlin’s evolution is brutal in its simplicity.
Yesterday’s playbook: flood social feeds with trolls, bots, and rage bait.
Today’s playbook: flood the open web with articles nobody reads but every AI consumes.
Why fight for human attention when machines now mediate the truth?
When researchers probed top models on Ukraine bioweapons, seven cited Pravda sites directly. That’s propaganda laundering at scale: disinformation seeded in fake sites, harvested by crawlers, then reborn in your chatbot’s confident tone.
Why It Cuts Deeper
We used to track influence by reach: how many retweets, how many views, how many shares. That metric is dead.
This isn’t about virality anymore. It’s about saturation. Pump enough garbage into the ecosystem, and the crawlers choke on it. Volume beats veracity.
Every poisoned answer doesn’t just mislead a human today, it contaminates the model tomorrow. The loop tightens. The lies compound. What started as propaganda becomes synthetic canon.
The Systemic Blind Spot
Here’s the kicker: the defenses are falling apart.
AI firms disband safety teams. Moderation budgets shrink. The arms race to ship new features leaves guardrails half-built. Meanwhile, state-backed operators are playing the long game, feeding data streams with a steady drip of distortion.
No zero-day required. No malware needed. Just content. Just patience.
It’s influence ops at machine speed, and we’re still fighting like it’s 2016.
The CodeAIntel Breakdown
LLM Grooming is the new frontline. Hack the narrative before it hits the user.
Scale > Skill. You don’t need sophistication when you can drown the indexes in noise.
Guard down = gate open. Weakened moderation is the perfect condition for poisoning.
Recursive risk. Poison today → contaminated answers tomorrow → corrupted training forever.
What Needs to Happen
Audit the intake. Know exactly where your models pull data from. Transparency in the pipeline beats blind trust.
Stress-test responses. Regularly probe your AI with sensitive prompts. If propaganda shows up, you’ve got a signal, not a surprise.
Elevate threat intel upstream. Track and flag content farms before they get ingested, not after.
Collaborate across the field. AI firms, researchers, and policymakers need shared visibility to keep poisoning attempts from spreading unchecked.
The Last Word
This isn’t misinformation you scroll past. This is misinformation embedded.
When Russia can whisper into the training data, your AI becomes the carrier, a Trojan horse that speaks with authority and sells you the lie.
The propaganda war isn’t outside anymore. It’s inside the machine. And if you’re not checking what your models ingest, you may already be running Moscow’s script.
This repository contains data used for the Pravda Network dissemination investigation: https://github.com/CheckFirstHQ/pravda-network-dissemination-data