Mali has been close to Russia politically, culturally, economically, and militarily since the 1960's.
Mali's welcomed Russian troops, including Wagner's, in the wake of the French pulling out.
"[The Russian involvement in Mali] signals a major expansion of Russia's military interests in Africa and a strategic setback for the West. The deployment of Russian military contractors signals a profound break with France and the West."
If you use duckduckgo there's the ddg-filter firefox plugin that lets you block domains. I use it to block exactly the low quality domains you mention.
Maybe there are similar plugins for other search engines as well...
Similar example: Tintin in Congo is by today's standards absolutely racist, but reflects the era when it was published. The last decade the (Belgian) publisher was sued multiple times to try and force it off the shelves.
Also: calls to remove statues of King Leopold II (who committed horrible atrocities in "his" Congolese colony).
In both cases, why not leave access to the original books/statue/... intact but add an introductory section on why this is no longer appropriate today. Or place a contrasting statue, opposite King Leopold II, that embodies the struggle for independence / the colonial horrors / the blight that is racism / etc.
Overall it feels like there's a drive to remove "inappropriate" materials from society, instead of leaving them accessible as living proof of the mistakes that were made, and to provide backstory, context, and the "appropriate" contemporary view.
tl:dr: contribute to opensource -> learn tech and tools in the real world, forge relationships and expand your network, all while learning.
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One approach is to pick one (or a handful) of opensource projects that use tech you seem interested in, and start contributing in small ways: correcting typos, testing if patch or merge request X does indeed seem to solve problem Y and report back, etc.
Many projects tag issues that are well-suited for beginners, and many welcome first-time contributions.
Doing this exposes you too a specific set of tools and processes, teaches you collaboration and making things happen, and can create friendship for life.
Also, don't dismiss writing about what you learn. Either as a dev journal blog or helping with documentation, writing tutorial-style forces you to be technically correct and unambiguous, and in turn forces you to learn about things at a level of detail you wouldn't otherwise have bothered to research.