Information in the Internet Age

Thirty years ago, in mid-1994, the number of web sites on the Internet numbered only three thousand. By our launch in late 2006, that number had passed the hundred million mark with half those active. As of our refresh (2025), there are approximately 1.13 billion websites globally, with roughly 200 million actively maintained.

Many see this ever-accelerating explosion as the "democratization" of the Internet, the end of dominance over control of information and its dissemination by commercial media—"big business." Today, one need know neither programming languages nor web server parameters to be published on the Internet, only a web-enabled mobile telephone sending an Email to their blogging website.

This democratization has also brought about the deterioration of the Internet as a reliable source of information, particularly in the area of geopolitics. This deterioration is not simply the result of the accumulation of uninformed blogging. While organizations devoted to the betterment of people's circumstances and to the establishment and exercise of their rights for political self-expression have at their disposal a new way to disseminate information, the Internet has also given rise to a veritable cottage industry of sites devoted to promoting propaganda under the guise of painting themselves to be reputable objective sources. Facilities such as the "open" encyclopedia, Wikipedia, are also open to abuse by such parties.

Alarmed at the concerted effort to legitimize Russia's take-over of Moldova's Trans-Dniester ("Transnistria") in the press and on Wikipedia, AFGPI was conceived and founded in December, 2006 as an informal multi-national alliance of concerned individuals, many whose lives have been touched by events which Internet propagandists now seek to deny or to twist into the opposite of the truth—and who are rightfully alarmed at the levels of funding being directed at the dissemination of propaganda, even to the extent of placing ads on legitimate sites to direct unsuspecting readers to propaganda.

We reactivated our site (2025) to make our research on the Kremlin-driven propaganda efforts surrounding Transnistria available.

Our goals were and are straightforward:

• unmask and expose the propagandists, and
• identify and promote reliable sources of information.

Where you, our readers, are concerned, we hope to:

• alarm you and prompt you to thoroughly investigate the sources you rely on, and to
• arm you to read propaganda: to distill its true purpose and to identify whose non-democratic agenda it is serving.

There is no greater disservice to the potential of the Internet to unite and inform than to use it to spread propaganda seeking to divide and obfuscate. When the propagandists label us as "propaganda," then we will know we have been noticed and are making a positive impact.