Slopwatch: Google News is Pumping in Lots of Web Traffic Into Fake Sites That Say "Linux"

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 30, 2025

This morning we published a "Slopwatch", but here we are again with yet more (newer) examples, starting with LinuxSecurity, which became a slopfarm last year or the year before that. These are fakes:

Notice the SEO around "Debian", "Linux", "security".... classic spamfarm tactics, albeit in slopfarm form (constructed with LLMs).

There's also the webpronews slopfarm, propped up by Google News. Today Google had the results for "Linux" stacked/stuffed with the following fake 'articles':

The above (most but not all) are lots of Phoronix junk with slop images. Those are just bot versions of Phoronix pages. For sure a lot of the above are just Phoronix articles rewritten by LLMs; webpronews is publishing using a worrisome form of "state-of-the-art" plagiarism. webpronews is a parasite.

Also propped up by Google News today was this family of slopfarms: (a network of at least 3 fake news sites, operated by the same people and made to look real)

Blaming Windows and SAP issues on "Linux": (see Linux Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt (FUD): Blaming the Wrong Things on "Linux")

So basically, I estimate that somewhere between 30% and 40% of today's "news" about "Linux", as seen by Google News, is LLM slop. That's really appalling. █

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