Google News Drowning in (or Actively Promoting) Slopfarms Again
LLM slop is a nuisance. It's basically trash, it's plagiarism, it's a pain in the neck. Slopfarms are not novelties; they're cheaters and scammers (or Serial Sloppers) taking over the webspace and taking other people's work.
Google News has sadly been full of slop about "linux" lately (again). Slop is all over the place, I saw almost a dozen examples yesterday alone.
Consider all those WebProNews 'articles' promoted as news about "linux":
All of them are fake. Fake authors, fake images, fake text.
Slop from this other domain also made it through to Google News:
And at least three from this prolific slopfarm:
Another pair of slopfarms:
When 2025 was ending it seemed like Google News was cracking down on slopfarms. As 2026 began it still felt like the problem was coming under control, but this past week Google truly saturated results with slop.
Was this intentional?
It also added Linuxiac to the "News" index.
Linuxiac used to be an OK site, but these days Linuxiac is a part-time slopfarm.
Microsoft boosting is the latest 'article' in Linuxiac, apparently composed by LLMs with Microsoft's own promotional language:
We quit linking to Linuxiac, once in the middle of last year and then again shortly after someone alerted us the site was producing fake articles or partially fake articles (plagiarism) using LLMs. Upon checking that was indeed the case and it's still correct... at least some/most of the time.
On the bright side, the above slopfarms aren't new, what's new is Google sending them a lot of traffic. We no longer see many or any sites "defecting" to the "Dark Side" (slop). █