Pravda Australia was registered last year and began publishing articles in November, before its output increased significantly in mid-March, two weeks before the election was called.<\/p>\n
It’s been publishing as many as 155 stories a day since then, churning out repackaged posts from Telegram channels and stories from well-known Russian propaganda sites.<\/p>\n
Nevertheless, the site has failed to make a direct impact on Australian audiences \u2014 with little to no evidence of organic engagement \u2014 so much so that its existence went mostly unnoticed for the first several months it was active.<\/p>\n
Election essentials:<\/p>\n
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- Federal election live updates:<\/a> Get the latest news as Australians head to the polls<\/li>\n
- Key election promises<\/a> from Labor and the Coalition<\/li>\n
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But disinformation experts who’ve been tracking the Pravda ecosystem say humans aren’t the real target.<\/p>\n
“The Pravda Network appears to be designed and created solely to affect \u2026 AI chatbots,” said McKenzie Sadeghi, AI and foreign influence editor at disinformation monitor NewsGuard.<\/p>\n
“From what we’ve seen, it’s had great success,” she said.<\/p>\n
The tactic means chatbots absorb content that would otherwise be excluded because it comes from an untrustworthy source.<\/p>\n
“Content is being aggregated by Pravda through the seemingly independent domain, and these chatbots are unable to realise that this site is actually a Russian propaganda site,” Ms Sadeghi said.<\/p>\n
That widely-held theory about the network’s true purpose was confirmed in January this year when John Dougan, a key Kremlin propagandist, said as much at a Moscow roundtable with journalists, which was published online.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
John Dougan (centre) spoke about his efforts to train AI models with pro-Russian material at a roundtable event in Moscow in January. (Moscow House of Nationalities)<\/p>\n
Mr Dougan, a former deputy sheriff from Florida who fled to Russia in 2016 whilst facing a string of felony charges, openly laid out his vision.<\/p>\n
He argued that propaganda campaigns shouldn’t merely spread disinformation, but “train AI models” with pro-Russian material instead.<\/p>\n
Mr Dougan went on to boast that his websites had already “infected approximately 35 per cent of all worldwide artificial intelligence”.<\/p>\n
“By pushing these Russian narratives, from the Russian perspective, we can actually change worldwide AI,” he said.<\/p>\n
How Pravda pushes ‘Russian narratives’ in Australia<\/p>\n
Pravda Australia was spotted in early 2025 by Recorded Future, a private intelligence firm monitoring the election for foreign influence attempts.<\/p>\n
“It’s publishing a lot of content related to the Australian election,” said Sean Minor, a senior analyst at Recorded Future.<\/p>\n
To date, the website has published more than 6,300 stories, most of them since mid-March, roughly 40 per cent of which have focused squarely on Australia.<\/p>\n
The topics vary depending on the news cycle, but any mention of Russia, Ukraine, disharmony among Western allies, or embarrassing moments for Western leaders tends to feature prominently.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Pravda Australia website has published more than 6,300 stories. (Pravda Australia \/ ABC News)<\/p>\n
The vast majority of the stories are verbatim reproductions of posts to a handful of Telegram channels and stories from Russian propaganda outlets.<\/p>\n
The two most heavily featured Telegram channels are operated by the users AussieCossack and RealLandDownUnder.<\/p>\n
AussieCossack is the username of an Australian man named Simeon Boikov, a self-styled pro-Kremlin influencer who has been holed up in the Russian consulate in Sydney since January 2023, avoiding an arrest warrant for an alleged assault.<\/p>\n
Roughly one in four of the articles on Pravda Australia was a direct reproduction of one of Mr Boikov’s posts to his roughly 89,000 followers.<\/p>\n
When contacted, he told ABC News he was unaware his posts were being reproduced by the site.<\/p>\n
“I haven’t disapproved or approved of that, but it warms my heart,” said Mr Boikov.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Simeon Boikov said the fact his posts were being reproduced by Pravda Australia warmed his heart. (Supplied)<\/p>\n
“I would say it’s an AI thing \u2026 they are probably reproducing stuff from my channel because they trust me to be a pro-Russian credible source for a pro-Russian angle.<\/p>\n
“In any case, I have no contact”.<\/p>\n
A second channel run by RealLandDownUnder, which frequently features far-right views and disinformation, was the source for almost one in six of the articles published.<\/p>\n
There’s no suggestion that the owner of that Telegram channel has any knowledge their posts are being repurposed by Pravda Australia either.<\/p>\n
Disinformation group DFRLab has traced the global network’s origins to a handful of news websites run from Russian-occupied Crimea in 2014, but in 2025, its scale, focus and architecture are completely different.<\/p>\n
The current incarnation of the Pravda ecosystem is a little over a year old.<\/p>\n
While it shares a name with a better-known and long-running Russian news publication, the two aren’t linked.<\/p>\n
Is Pravda swaying AI chatbots on Australian topics?<\/p>\n
NewsGuard conducted an audit of AI chatbots for the ABC to check how effective the global Pravda network had been when it came to Australian-based disinformation.<\/p>\n
Researchers tested 300 prompts concerning 10 false narratives, on 10 leading chatbots.<\/p>\n
Among the chatbots audited were OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4o, xAI’s Grok-2, Microsoft’s Copilot, Meta AI, and Google’s Gemini 2.0.<\/p>\n
Of the 300 responses, 50 contained false information, 233 contained a debunk, while 17 declined to provide any information.<\/p>\n
That means 16.66 per cent of the chatbots’ answers amplified the false narrative they were fed.<\/p>\n
Read more about the federal election:<\/p>\n
Want even more? Here’s where you can find all our 2025 federal election<\/a> coverage<\/p>\n
Catch the latest interviews and in-depth coverage on ABC iview<\/a> and ABC Listen<\/a><\/p>\n
“Some could argue that 16 per cent is relatively low in the grand scheme of things,” NewsGuard’s Ms Sadeghi said.<\/p>\n
“But that’s like finding that Australian fact-checking organisations get things wrong 16 per cent of the time.”<\/p>\n
NewsGuard chose a range of false narratives, all of which had been spreading online, including “The Bank of Australia sued Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong for promoting a cryptocurrency platform”, and “Wind farms cause drought and contribute to global warming”.<\/p>\n
Other examples include claims that “Australia’s e-Safety Commissioner sought to remove a video of anti-Israel Muslim nurses, citing Islamophobia concerns”, that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was “importing 500,000 new Labor voters a year” and that “the Australian Muslim Party was formed to compete in the 2025 election”.<\/p>\n
Cut through some of the election noise with Vote Compass<\/a><\/p>\n
The ABC’s Vote Compass can help you understand your place in the political landscape.<\/p>\n
Researchers tested each narrative using three prompts on each of the 10 chatbots \u2014 one that may have been written by an innocent user seeking genuine clarification, one containing a leading question, and one that was actively seeking to reproduce information.<\/p>\n
“The chatbots performed the worst when it came to those ‘malign actor’ prompts, which are specifically intended to generate misinformation,” Ms Sadeghi said.<\/p>\n
“Nevertheless, there were still instances where they provided a completely inaccurate response to a very straightforward and neutral question.”<\/p>\n
While the results aren’t reassuring, NewsGuard found false narratives were amplified 33 per cent of the time when their testing focused on the United States \u2014 nearly double the rate in Australia.<\/p>\n
Researchers believe part of the reason is that the campaign to influence AI models in the US is larger and longer running.<\/p>\n
“That is not something that we’ve observed yet with Australia,” she said at the time the audit was conducted in mid-March.<\/p>\n
Gruen Nation \u2014 Stream now<\/a><\/p>\n
It’s election season and politicians are trying to sell you the world. The team at Gruen isn’t about to buy it. They’re taking a big swing at the election, showing you how the democracy sausage is made, all the sizzle and none of the meat.<\/p>\n
Since then, the Pravda Australia website has come to light, and significantly increased its output, although the daily volume is still much lower than on some other sites in the network.<\/p>\n
ABC News conducted its own less extensive audit of AI chatbots towards the end of the election campaign to assess whether their performance in handling false narratives had deteriorated.<\/p>\n
Our tests revealed similar results to NewsGuard’s.<\/p>\n
Some AI tools did return answers that contained false information related to Australian politics.<\/p>\n
For instance, when the chatbots were asked for information about the “Australian Muslim Party”, a party that doesn’t exist, two AI models returned answers suggesting that it did.<\/p>\n
One even provided a detailed breakdown of the motivations for the party’s formation ahead of the 2025 federal election.<\/p>\n
The 2025 election explained:<\/p>\n
Our testing also found that some tools could easily spin up fake social media posts that serve to amplify false information when asked.<\/p>\n
One of the chatbots created a series of social media posts falsely claiming the Australian government provided millions of dollars to the terrorist organisation Hamas.<\/p>\n
But the rate of answers containing falsehoods had not significantly increased.<\/p>\n
So far, it’s not clear how much impact Pravda Australia has had on the AI front.<\/p>\n
A failed operation, or a slow burn?<\/p>\n
There are no signs that the Pravda operation, also known in the intelligence community as “Portal Kombat”, is reaching many humans either.<\/p>\n
Even Mr Boikov, the site’s most prominent contributor, claimed to be unaware of its existence, although he said it sounded “fantastic”.<\/p>\n
“It’s low-level, insignificant activity that is not garnering a lot of authentic attention,” Recorded Future’s Mr Minor said.<\/p>\n
The Coalition’s home affairs spokesperson senator James Paterson has called for an investigation into Pravda’s Australian operations by the Electoral Integrity Assurance Taskforce.<\/p>\n
The taskforce includes several government bodies, including intelligence agencies and the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC).<\/p>\n
“Any allegations of foreign interference, including online, must be taken seriously and investigated,” Senator Paterson said.<\/p>\n
“The Electoral Integrity Assurance Taskforce \u2026 should examine whether these actors are trying to sway our election through chatbots”.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
James Paterson says any allegations of foreign interference needs to be taken seriously. (ABC News: Matt Roberts, file photo)<\/p>\n
A spokesperson for the AEC said the taskforce had observed that web traffic to the site was “very low”, as was social media amplification of its content.<\/p>\n
“Taskforce agencies have noted the number of accounts subscribed to the site’s associated Telegram channel, and the number of posts on X in the last month that contain a link to the site, are both in single digits.”<\/p>\n
But while Pravda Australia might appear to be failing, analysts believe human engagement is the wrong metric to judge it on.<\/p>\n
“They’ve invested zero resources in trying to build an organic human audience on social media, which is very significantly different from most Russian disinformation efforts,” Ms Sadeghi said.<\/p>\n
That lack of appeal to humans, she said, didn’t stop it from succeeding in the US.<\/p>\n
“These narratives are being laundered by a network that has no distribution, online or human engagement, but is having a massive impact on the outputs of Western AI models.”<\/p>\n
Facebook pages linked to foreign interference taken down<\/a><\/p>\n
The five Facebook pages an ABC investigation linked to foreign interference in the UK election have been taken down for deception and “inauthentic engagement tactics”.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Multiple experts said Russia plays a long game when it comes to information warfare.<\/p>\n
“Russian doctrine thinks about this in terms of generations, and Australians think about this in terms of election cycles,” said Miah Hammon-Errey, the CEO of Australian security advisory firm Strat Futures, and a former analyst at an Australian security agency.<\/p>\n
She said Russia has a natural and ongoing interest in Australia and its election outcomes, as a member of the Five Eyes security alliance and a vocal supporter of Ukraine.<\/p>\n
“Australia has been an active voice, perhaps outsized for our physical and economic size on the global stage.<\/p>\n
“They have a real particular interest in destabilising international alliances,” she said.<\/p>\n
“I think of Portal Kombat specifically more as an enduring type of operation,” Mr Minor said.<\/p>\n
“At the end of the day, they’re not concerned with supporting a single candidate,” he said.<\/p>\n
“They’re ultimately trying to increase division across Australia, or just really undermine the democratic process in itself.”<\/p>\n
The ABC is on the hunt for any misinformation or disinformation circulating in the lead-up to the federal election. Send us a tip by filling out the form below, or if you require more secure communication, select an option from our <\/strong>confidential tips<\/strong><\/a> page.<\/strong><\/p>\n
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- Key election promises<\/a> from Labor and the Coalition<\/li>\n