# Analysing State-Backed Propaganda Websites: a New Dataset and Linguistic Study

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.14032 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14032/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 21 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Oct 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [UMAP: Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection for Dimension Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03426/) (2018)
- [MPNet: Masked and Permuted Pre-training for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09297/) (2020)
- [BERTopic: Neural topic modeling with a class-based TF-IDF procedure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05794/) (2022)
- [Fine-Grained Analysis of Propaganda in News Articles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.02517/) (2019)
- [A Survey on Computational Propaganda Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08024/) (2020)
- [Findings of the NLP4IF-2019 Shared Task on Fine-Grained Propaganda Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.09982/) (2019)
- [Happenstance: Utilizing Semantic Search to Track Russian State Media Narratives about the Russo-Ukrainian War On Reddit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14484/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [PropaInsight: Toward Deeper Understanding of Propaganda in Terms of Techniques, Appeals, and Intent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18997/) (2024)
- [The FIGNEWS Shared Task on News Media Narratives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.18147/) (2024)
- [Hoaxpedia: A Unified Wikipedia Hoax Articles Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.02175/) (2024)
- [SemCAFE: When Named Entities make the Difference Assessing Web Source Reliability through Entity-level Analytics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08776/) (2025)
- [LLM-based Detection of Manipulative Political Narratives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.14354/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper analyses two hitherto unstudied sites sharing state-backed disinformation, Reliable Recent News (rrn.world) and WarOnFakes (waronfakes.com), which publish content in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, and Spanish. We describe our content acquisition methodology and perform cross-site unsupervised topic clustering on the resulting multilingual dataset. We also perform linguistic and temporal analysis of the web page translations and topics over time, and investigate articles with false publication dates. We make publicly available this new dataset of 14,053 articles, annotated with each language version, and additional metadata such as links and images. The main contribution of this paper for the NLP community is in the novel dataset which enables studies of disinformation networks, and the training of NLP tools for disinformation detection.