A wave of fake news sites with Russian ties are popping up in the US
In America’s depleted field of journalism, a handful of websites have emerged in recent weeks with names that suggest a focus on news close to home: DC Weekly, the New York News Daily, the Chicago Chronicle and a newer sister publication, the Miami Chronicle. .
In fact, they are not local news organizations at all. They are Russian creations, researchers and government officials say, intended to mimic real news organizations to boost Kremlin propaganda by interspersing it with a sometimes strange mix of stories about crime, politics and culture.
While Russia has long sought ways to influence public debate in the United States, the fake news organizations — at least five so far — represent a technological leap forward in their efforts to find new platforms to deceive unsuspecting American readers. The researchers and officials said the sites could form the basis of an online network poised to expose disinformation ahead of the U.S. presidential election in November.
Patrick Warren, co-director of Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub, which has exposed covert Russian disinformation efforts, said advances in artificial intelligence and other digital tools “have made this even easier and the content they has made doing even more purposeful. .”
The Miami Chronicle website first appeared on February 26. The slogan falsely claims it has produced “the Florida News since 1937.”
Amid some real-life reports, the site published a story last week about a “leaked audio recording” of Victoria Nuland, the US Assistant Secretary of State for Political Affairs, discussing a shift in US support for the beleaguered Russian opposition after the death of the Russian dissident. Aleksei A. Navalny. The recording is a gross forgery, according to government officials who would speak only anonymously to discuss intelligence matters.
The campaign, according to experts and officials, appears to involve remnants of the media empire once controlled by Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, a former aide to President Vladimir V. Putin whose troll factory, the Internet Research Agency, meddled in the presidential election of 2016 between Donald J. Trump and Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Mr. Prigozhin died in a plane crash outside Moscow in August after leading a brief military uprising against the Russian army, but the continuation of his operations underlines the importance the Kremlin attaches to its information battle around the world. It is not clear who exactly took over.
“Putin would be a complete idiot if he let the network fall apart,” said Darren Linvill, Mr. Warren’s partner at Clemson. “He needs the Prigozhin network more than ever.”
Clemson investigators disclosed the Russian connections behind the DC Weekly website in a report in December. After the revelation, Russian stories began appearing on another site created in October, Clear Story News. Since then, new outlets have appeared.
The websites of the Chicago Chronicle and the New York News Daily, whose names are clearly intended to evoke the city’s legendary Daily News tabloid, were both created on January 18, according to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, that controls domains.
All outlets use the same WordPress software to build the sites and therefore have similar designs.
The media has logos and names reminiscent of a bygone era of American journalism, an attempt to create an appearance of authenticity. A Chicago Chronicle operated from 1895 to 1907 before folding for a reason that would be all too familiar to today’s struggling newspapers: it was unprofitable.
They are also regularly updated with important news, giving the impression of current affairs at first glance. An article about the Supreme Court’s ruling on Trump’s eligibility to remain on the primary ballot in Colorado appeared on the Miami Chronicle’s website within hours of the decision.
In other respects the websites are poorly constructed, even incomplete in parts. For example, the Miami Chronicle’s “about” page is filled with Lorem ipsum, the Latin-based dummy text. Some images on the site have file names from the original Russian. (None of the sites post working contact information.)
The goal isn’t to trick a discerning reader into delving deeper into the website, let alone subscribing, Mr. Linvill said. The goal instead is to give an aura of credibility to social media posts spreading the misinformation.
The effort follows a pattern the Kremlin has used before: whitewashing claims that first appear online through smaller news organizations. These reports are once again spreading online and appearing in even more news organizations, including Russia’s state news agencies and television networks.
“The page is just there to look realistic enough to make a casual reader think they are reading a genuine US branded article,” Mr Linvill said.
According to Clemson’s research, DC Weekly published a number of Kremlin stories starting in August. One included a false claim that the wife of Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, had purchased more than $1.1 million worth of jewelry from the Cartier store in New York during his visit to the United Nations in September.
The site claims to have seventeen journalists, but these appear to be made up. The biography of the author of that story, named Jessica Devlin, used as her profile photo a photo of Judy Batalion, the author of a best-selling book about Jewish women who fought the Nazis. Ms. Batalion said she had never heard of the site or its author until fact-checkers contacted her.
Other articles appearing on the sites appear to come from real news organizations, including Reuters and Fox News, or from the English-language news agencies of Russian state media, such as RT. Some stories casually included instructions or responses from one of OpenAI’s chatbots, Mr. Linvill and Mr. Warren wrote in the study.
The New York News Daily recently published a story about alleged American plans to interfere in this month’s Russian elections, the winner of which, Mr. Putin, is a foregone conclusion. It was spread on social media by people with long ties to the Kremlin’s state media apparatus.
Another article last week appeared to come from a fictional character on The user on X was named Brian Wilson and was described as an associate producer at Paramount Pictures.
The account has only posted 85 times to A week later, the user suddenly announced a deal to produce a biopic of Mr. Zelensky – “The Price of Victory” – in a series of posts. These were followed last week by two more featuring real videos of actors Chuck Norris and Dolph Lundgren, manipulated to wish him luck with the film.
The videos appear to come from Cameo, the celebrity greeting app that was part of a previous Russian campaign that Microsoft announced in December.
A spokeswoman for Paramount Pictures, Brooke Robertson, said no one named Brian Wilson worked at the studio. A spokesperson for Cameo said on Monday that the company was not aware of the videos, but added: “As a general rule, when posts abusing Cameo content are brought to our attention, we request their removal respective platform.” Later that day, the two videos were blocked on the X account for intellectual property infringement. X later suspended the account.
Reports about the film spread widely on Telegram. Many users cited the actual New York Daily News as a source, saying it underscored the misuse of Western financial aid in Ukraine’s war against Russia. The story was also amplified by media outlets previously linked to Russian intelligence services, including NewsFront and Politnavigator, said Clint Watts, general manager of Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center.
The articles typically receive hundreds of posts on various platforms including X, Facebook and Telegram, as well as Reddit, Gab and Truth Social, although it is difficult to measure the exact reach. All told, they could theoretically reach thousands of readers, even millions.
“This is absolutely a prelude to the kind of interference we will see in the election cycle,” Mr Linvill said. “It is cheap, highly targeted and clearly effective.”
Jeanne Noonan DelMundo reporting contributed.