Bonum Certa Men Certa

Slopwatch: Google News Has Lost the Plot

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 31, 2025

The frequency or the prominence of LLM slop seems to have grown in Google News. The slop is drowning out the signal. It's really bad. We'll come to that in a moment.

So Google News links to Linux Journal, which based on the structure alone gives away its misuse of bots:

Veil of Vigilance: Tails 6.0’s New Frontiers in Surveillance Resistance

Pure nonsense. Same as LinuxSecurity with LLM slop, i.e. the usual:

Hardening Open-Source Web Applications: Best Practices for Security Professionals

Bland headline and pointless text. The wrong output of a lazy "prompt engineer"?

Then there's this relatively new slopfarm in Google News:

Linux Kernel 6.16 Released. New Features and Improvements Without Much Woww Effect

It's slop, as usual:

Last weekend the final version of the Linux kernel 6.16 was released

Google News is also promoting FUD.

Consider this latest misdirection. Now a pair of slopfarms run by the same people and containing only slop images are propped up by Google News:

Gunra Ransomware’s New Linux Variant Uses 100 Encryption Threads and Partial Encryption Feature

Gunra Ransomware New Linux Variant Runs Up To 100 Encryption Threads With New Partial Encryption Feature

Fake articles about what's really (originally) a Windows issue.

Also boosted by Google News today... at least 4 fake articles about "Linux". This is all from a slopfarm containing slop images and fake author names:

 Linux Kernel 6.17 Drops Uniprocessor Builds for SMP Optimization

 Lyon Switches to Linux, Open-Source from Microsoft by 2026

 Sparky Linux 7.8 ‘Orion Belt’: Lightweight Windows 11 Alternative

AMD Ryzen Threadripper 9970X

So basically it has been a bad day in Google News. Almost the majority of articles returned for "Linux" are fakes.

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