The Disinformation Barons: Inside the Shadowy World of ‘Pink Slime’ Media Networks

In part two of an investigation into the shadowy world of for-profit disinformation, journalist Steve Dinneen exposes how hostile factions run sophisticated smear campaigns for cash, leaving victims with nowhere to hide. The investigation begins with an unexpected email exchange with a man who calls himself “Anonymous watchman of the freedom of speech, retired” – a self-described operator of what has become known as a “pink slime” network. Named after the high-calorie paste made from animal offcuts, the term has evolved dramatically since 2002: from cheap online content designed to drive clicks in the 2010s, to today’s sophisticated, for-profit disinformation operations. The Watchman, as Dinneen calls him, is remarkably candid about his business model, “gladly” accepting money from “lovely Kazakhs, Ukrainian oligarchs, and crypto gambling crooks from France, Germany or Israel” in exchange for publishing stories. “We believe that money is equally as important as truth,” he declares, adding with cynical clarity: “Nobody will pursue the latter if it is unpaid.”

The investigation traces back to Dinneen’s earlier report into 2Trom, a network of apparently British local news websites whose business model consists of accepting cash to run detailed hit pieces alongside innocuous stories about council meetings and supermarket openings. The network, which owns at least a dozen websites and churns out hundreds of stories daily, proved impossible to locate physically – every address, phone number and social media account led to dead ends. The summer brought a landmark moment when Uzbek financier Ovik Mkrtchyan sued the London Post and its owner Viktor Tokarev over a story he argued was “salacious, grave and inherently likely to cause harm,” winning more than £220,000 in damages after the London Post failed to defend the case. Following publication of the original investigation, Dinneen’s inbox flooded with similar accounts from victims, lawyers and reputation managers. Among them was “Giles,” a boutique investment firm founder who endured a three-year campaign beginning with a story in a major British newspaper, followed by coordinated tweets from newly-created accounts insinuating he was a Russian supporter, and emails to his investors warning them against his “foul” company. Within a month, his name appeared in more than 20 articles across countries he had never visited. “We’re a tiny firm, we haven’t broken any sanctions. I’m certainly not a ‘Putin lover’ – I was donating to the cause in Ukraine at the time!” Giles protested. He believed the campaign stemmed from a court case against fraudsters who had cost his firm tens of millions of dollars – the purpose being to discourage him from testifying. Despite the ongoing attacks, Giles won his case, though the damage persists. “Our reputation has been tarnished. It’s cost us time and money. But the real damage is with potential future clients. In the best case scenario, they come to me and say ‘I found these articles about you’ and I can explain. But it’s the ones that stop picking up the phone…”

The scale of the problem is staggering. The World Economic Forum ranked dis- and misinformation as the second biggest threat to world order, behind only geo-economic confrontation and ahead of extreme weather events and armed conflict. Prime Minister Andy Burnham has announced a new National Centre for Information Defence to stem the “poisonous tide.” At the forefront of the fight is the Junk News Team at Schillings, a prestigious law firm whose database of pink slime operations has grown to more than 350 sites, with a 355 per cent increase in logged junk news websites between 2023 and 2024 – a spike attributed to mass AI adoption making content production trivial. Partner Juliet Young explains the three archetypes: anti-corruption sites, financial news sites, and local or regional trade sites. The purpose of attacks varies, but often comes down to causing financial difficulty. “There was one case we were looking at where the article was stuffed with red flag terms like ‘Russia’, ‘Putin’ and ‘sanctions’, so it would deliberately be picked up in due diligence assessments,” Young reveals. The business model has also evolved to include “pay-to-delete” – after creating a smear campaign, operators approach victims with an offer to remove content for a fee, often couched as an administrative cost but with a zero added to the original bill. “What starts as a one-off payment can become a subscription service to keep your name clean. A protection racket, in effect,” Dinneen notes. One source shared an email chain showing the US-based website Grit Daily attempting to charge him several thousand dollars to remove an article, despite his insistence it was part of a smear campaign.

The investigation’s most striking case study is Leeds TV, a legitimate local news source until 2022 when it was hijacked. Previously the homepage of the Leeds Student TV channel – featuring a bubbly, rainbow-coloured logo and contributions from a young Alice Levine, later of “My Dad Wrote a Porno” fame – the site now bears a dull, functional design almost identical to the London Post. Its AI-generated About Us page speaks of providing “a valuable platform for the community to connect,” yet the content tells a different story: thousands of AI-generated local-interest pieces alongside detailed articles on international geopolitics, including hit pieces on Russian billionaires and a fixation with super-rich former Soviet state residents. The listed editorial staff – “chief editor” Brian O’Neill, “economist and corporate lawyer” Danny Mills, “sociologist” Linda Pantry, and two supposed University of Glasgow PhD students – have no bylines elsewhere and appear not to exist. When Dinneen emailed the site’s Protonmail account, the Watchman responded with a rambling confession of the operation’s business model, taking money from “Kazakhs, Ukrainian oligarchs, and crypto gambling crooks,” while claiming a moral compass: “To take money for Putin’s bloody bastards is a disgrace.” He denied publishing fakes, insisting his “investigations and fact-checking are comprehensive,” yet didn’t respond when it was pointed out every article appears written by ChatGPT. Asked about the obsession with former Soviet states, he revealed: “The co-owner of the LST, as well as a dozen minor media outlets from Wales, Yorkshire, Lancashire and Scotland, came from Ukraine.” He was scathing about the London Post, claiming it is “OFFICIALLY tied to Moscow” and that his network would hardly collaborate with “the Moscow-based London Post, even after the war.” The exchange revealed not a monolithic propaganda machine but a series of hostile factions – a marketplace of disinformation catering to customers’ political leanings. When asked about the non-existent editorial staff, Watchman was unperturbed: “If you were doing investigative journalism in the gambling sector, illegal high-risk processing, or even the shadow fleet, you’d try to keep your name out of the spotlight.” He signed off with a thinly veiled threat: “Please keep in mind: ‘A little knowledge is a dangerous thing’.”

Ukraine has emerged as a particular hotspot for pink slime operations, where war creates the perfect storm of distrust and information-fatigue. In 2021, Meta blocked more than 50 accounts linked to a Ukrainian NGO called Anti-Corruption Blockpost, suspected of running targeted campaigns. The so-called anti-corruption website – claiming to expose corruption while actually facilitating it – has become big business. The Fake Register, run by an anonymous collective of Ukrainian journalists, lists more than 100 disinformation websites, including Antikor, described as “a platform for informational dumping, fake news, and commissioned campaigns.” Bearing a government-style banner with a shield and Ukrainian flag, Antikor presents itself as the “national anti-corruption portal” but was blocked in Ukraine in 2025 over allegations of spreading pro-Russian propaganda. Lawyer Julian Khorunzhiy of the firm Ario describes representing a Ukrainian bank against Antikor over stories alleging drug money laundering – claims a court found to be false. Between 2017 and 2026, Ario identified 20 articles on the portal, with similar stories appearing elsewhere. “Banking is a highly regulated sector where the trust of clients, business partners and the regulator is critical. In that environment, a sustained negative media narrative is certainly not a neutral factor,” Khorunzhiy says. Medical consultancy owner Vladislav Smirnov claims to be a victim of a long-running Antikor campaign, sending Dinneen a spreadsheet of more than 100 articles about him. He describes waves of negative stories published simultaneously across multiple seemingly-independent websites – on 24 January alone, one story appeared on 17 different sites using identical formatting. Antikor strenuously denies taking payment for stories or charging for deletion, insinuating Dinneen is a shill for a shadowy third party. The Watchman, when asked about links to Antikor, was dismissive: “If I wanted to be associated with antikor.ua, with the kind of money the Antikor network has, I wouldn’t waste my time on your fairy tales. Every minute of my time would be worth more than an hour of Schillings lawyers” – a comment that raised uncomfortable questions about how he knew about the Schillings meeting.

The mechanics of these operations are laid bare by Michael Macfarlane, founder of reputation management firm Michael Macfarlane Associates. “It’s completely terrifying how easy it is to manipulate the new information system,” he says. “What you’re seeing with Leeds TV and the London Post is just the tip of the iceberg.” He describes how a campaign can be instigated within hours for a few hundred dollars: “Within three or four days, I could have 10 articles appear. I could keep doing that every week until there were articles on websites all over the world, and you would never know it was me.” The system operates like a pyramid: the person behind the campaign gets a stooge to pay two or three people at the top with crypto, who then pay five different agencies to pay five more agencies to publish stories. “You’ll have five or six layers above the site where the content is published before you get to the ultimate funder,” Macfarlane explains. “Every single person in the pyramid will claim, ‘Oh, we’re just an unwitting intermediary, and no, we can’t disclose who funded us, for confidentiality reasons’.” The process achieves two goals: making a client look bad on Google, and seeding stories on legitimate or semi-legitimate websites to be used as sources for editing Wikidata and Wikipedia. Crucially, large language models use these sources to understand who a person is – meaning for a relatively small amount of money, attackers can have a real impact on how the internet perceives someone. Macfarlane’s clients have included those targeted by networks involving SEO agencies in Pakistan, Russia, Ukraine and “bizarrely, one in Liverpool.” His solution: “Give people stronger rights over what appears about them on the internet. We have to completely rethink how we police information.” But he is pessimistic about the broader trajectory: “These pink slime attacks are just the beginning – we’ll end up in a situation where nobody knows what the truth is. It will be absolute chaos.” Even the High Court victory that began this investigation offers limited hope – while Mkrtchyan won his case, the article remained live for weeks and cost £117,000 in legal fees to remove a piece that probably cost £150 to commission. The London Post continues regardless, publishing stories about marmosets found on buses alongside geopolitical hit pieces, business as usual. As Dinneen reflects on the investigation – the anonymous watchmen, the shadowy networks, the victims with nowhere to turn – the question of who is really calling the shots remains unanswered. “Am I comfortable putting myself out there in terms of exposing these sites?” he asks. “I’m not sure, to be honest. Watchman telling me his own anonymity is down to ‘quite a few bold and reckless investigators [being] disabled or [going] missing’ doesn’t put my mind at rest.”