Pink slime used to be the high-calorie paste made from animal offcuts; in the 2010s it became a byword for cheap online content created to drive clicks. Today it is something far more dangerous: a sophisticated, for-profit disinformation industry. In the second part of my investigation, I dived into a world where hostile factions run smear campaigns for cash and victims have nowhere to hide. It began with an unexpected reply to an email I had sent to a website I suspected of being part of an international disinformation network. A man calling himself “Anonymous watchman of the freedom of speech, retired” was happy to explain how his business worked. He gladly accepted money from “lovely Kazakhs, Ukrainian oligarchs, and crypto gambling crooks from France, Germany or Israel” in exchange for publishing stories. When I asked if he was affiliated with the London Post network, he was unimpressed. “A fool may ask more questions in an hour than a wise man can answer in seven years,” he wrote. He was not the monolithic propaganda machine I had expected, but something more chaotic: one of many freelance operators selling poison.
My investigation began months earlier, after Ovik Mkrtchyan, an Uzbek financier, sued an online newspaper called the London Post and its owner Viktor Tokarev over a story he argued was “salacious, grave and inherently likely to cause harm.” The London Post did not show up in court, and Mkrtchyan was awarded more than £220,000 in damages and costs. I had spent months looking into this network of apparently British local news websites, which seemed to accept cash to run long, detailed hit pieces alongside mundane stories about council meetings. No matter how hard I tried, I could not find the company that owned at least a dozen sites and continued to churn out hundreds of stories a day. A former director, a man using the name Matthew Martino, had spent the past year on a private jet tour documented on Instagram, but he was not saying much. Then, after my first article went live, my inbox lit up with people recounting similar experiences: victims, lawyers, publicists and reputation managers, all claiming they or their clients had been smeared by campaigns just like this. One financier, who I’ll call Giles, told me his three-year ordeal began with a story in a major British newspaper, followed by a wave of emails to his investors warning them to reconsider working with his “foul” company. Within a month, his name appeared in more than 20 articles, many published in countries he had never visited. He had grey hairs now, he said, but he did not regret fighting back.
These campaigns are built on two revenue streams: pay-to-display and pay-to-delete. Once a pink slime article is published, the victim is often approached by a website offering to remove it for a fee, usually couched as an “administrative cost.” But as one source explained, what starts as a one-off payment can become a subscription service to keep your name clean — a protection racket, in effect. One US-based website, Grit Daily, attempted to charge a victim several thousand dollars to remove an article, despite his insistence that the story was part of a smear campaign. The Junk News Team, a collective of disinformation researchers, breaks pink slime operations into three broad archetypes: bot-generated content, fake journalist personas, and local news clones. The mass adoption of AI has made it trivial to produce the volume of content needed to power such operations. The purpose of an attack is broad, they told me: it can be to poison due diligence reports, to create a smokescreen of negative search results, or to influence a commercial dispute. The World Economic Forum now ranks disinformation as the second biggest threat to the world order, behind only geo-economic confrontation and ahead of state-backed armed conflict. Yet the people running these networks are not masterminds; they are often just small-time operators who have learned to exploit a broken system.
Nowhere is the problem more acute than Ukraine, where war has created 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, which it suspected of running targeted campaigns against political figures. A collective called fake.net.ua maintains a database of fake sites and “commissioned campaigns,” and one of its entries is Antikor, a website that looks like an official government portal but is, according to the collective, a “platform for informational dumping, fake news, and commissioned campaigns.” Antikor is part of a network of as many as 20 websites, and it has been used to attack the bank Ario and its owner, Yaroslav Khorunzhiy. Between 2017 and 2026, Ario identified 20 articles about it on Antikor, with similar stories appearing on other websites and Telegram channels. Khorunzhiy’s client, a medical consultancy owner, shared a spreadsheet with more than 100 links to stories about him, all alleging he abused Ukraine’s medical tenders system. He said the stories were “completely fake” and designed to discredit him and his business. The bank eventually lost its licence, and while Khorunzhiy does not believe there was a direct causal link, he says a sustained negative media narrative is not a neutral factor.
The man I called Watchman eventually wrote back to me at length. He laid out how his network operated, taking money from those “Kazakhs, Ukrainian oligarchs, and crypto gambling crooks” in exchange for publishing stories. But he also claimed to have a moral compass: he would never accept money from “Putin’s confidants.” He was unperturbed when I pointed out that every article on the site Leeds TV appeared to have been written by ChatGPT. “If you were doing investigative journalism in the gambling sector, illegal high-risk processing, or even the shadow fleet,” he said, “you’d try to keep your name out of the spotlight.” He told me his own anonymity was down to “quite a few bold and reckless investigators being disabled or going missing.” That did not put my mind at rest. He was clearly enjoying himself, a budget Bond villain explaining his trade. When I asked if he was affiliated with the Ukrainian anti-corruption site Antikor, he was disappointed by my lack of understanding. “Come to your senses and start digging up the facts yourselves,” he wrote. He even knew I had been speaking to the law firm Schillings, which I had never mentioned. I could not tell if it was a lucky guess, a threat, or just paranoia.
So what can be done? The High Court route is expensive and often futile: you can win a case and still be left chasing a man who might not exist. Reputation manager Macfarlane says one client had 48 articles appear about him in less than 30 days, all on English-language websites apparently based in the UK and the US, but linked to Pakistan, Ukraine and Russia. He wants stronger rights over what appears about us online, but as a journalist who relies on free speech, I find that a difficult position to accept. Everyone I spoke to says they are doing their bit: Google says it tries to delist malicious content; World-Check says it keeps misinformation out of its reports. But the problem is systemic. There is no single pink slime godfather pulling the strings — just a scattered network of bad actors, many of them openly hostile to one another, all using essentially untraceable methods to peddle their bespoke services. As Watchman told me, he could instigate a campaign in a couple of hours for a few hundred dollars, and I would never know it was him. “I could keep doing that every week,” he said, “until there were articles on websites all over the world, and you would never know it was me.” The fight against pink slime, it seems, is a game of disinformation whack-a-mole — and the mole is winning.