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I Worked For The 'Mushroom Machine': Inside Bulgaria's Cash-For-Disinformation Network

An RFE/RL correspondent dipped his toe into a notorious content-sharing platform in Bulgaria where users get paid for setting up websites that spread disinformation and pro-Russian narratives.

Blitz is also a favored outlet for the public statements of controversial lawmaker and magnate Delyan Peevski, a leader of the Movement for Rights and Freedoms party who has been sanctioned by the United States for "significant corruption." By mid-2023, the Mushroom Site Machine was reproducing far fewer of the Moscow-inspired stories in what one of the authors of the HSSF report, Dimitar Vatsov, told RFE/RL was a "sharp change" that appeared to reflect other priorities. Todor Galev from the Center for the Study of Democracy in Sofia, a public-policy think tank, has noted links such as shared code between many of the Mushroom Site Machine's websites and AdRain.

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