LLMs as information warriors? Auditing how LLM-powered chatbots tackle disinformation about Russia's war in Ukraine

The rise of large language models (LLMs) has a significant impact on information warfare. By facilitating the production of content related to disinformation and propaganda campaigns, LLMs can amplify different types of information operations and mislead online users. In our study, we empirically investigate how LLM-powered chatbots, developed by Google, Microsoft, and Perplexity, handle disinformation about Russia's war in Ukraine and whether the chatbots' ability to provide accurate information on the topic varies across languages and over time. Our findings indicate that while for some chatbots (Perplexity), there is a significant improvement in performance over time in several languages, for others (Gemini), the performance improves only in English but deteriorates in low-resource languages.