Spate of mock news sites with Russian ties pop up in US
Into the depleted field of journalism in America, a handful of websites have appeared in recent weeks with names suggesting a focus on news close to home: D.C. 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, meant to mimic actual news organizations to push Kremlin propaganda by interspersing it among an at-times odd mix of stories about crime, politics and culture.
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While Russia has long sought ways to influence public discourse in the United States, the fake news organizations — at least five, so far — represent a technological leap in its efforts to find new platforms to dupe unsuspecting American readers. The sites, the researchers and officials said, could well be the foundations of an online network primed to surface disinformation before the U.S. presidential election in November.
Patrick Warren, a co-director at Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub, which has exposed furtive Russian disinformation efforts, said advances in artificial intelligence and other digital tools had “made this even easier to do and to make the content that they do even more targeted.”
The Miami Chronicle’s website first appeared Feb. 26. Its tagline falsely claims to have delivered “the Florida News since 1937.”
Amid some true reports, the site published a story last week about a “leaked audio recording” of Victoria Nuland, the U.S. undersecretary of state for political affairs, discussing a shift in U.S. support for Russia’s beleaguered opposition after the death of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny. The recording is a crude fake, according to administration officials who would speak only anonymously to discuss intelligence matters.
The campaign, the experts and officials say, appears to involve remnants of the media empire once controlled by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a former associate of Russian President Vladimir Putin whose troll factory, the Internet Research Agency, interfered in the 2016 presidential election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.
Prigozhin died in a plane crash outside Moscow in August after leading a brief military uprising against Russia’s military, but the continuation of his operations underscores the importance the Kremlin places on its information battles around the world. It is not clear who exactly has taken the helm.
“Putin would be a complete and utter idiot to let the network fall apart,” said Darren Linvill, Warren’s partner at Clemson. “He needs the Prigozhin network more than ever before.”
The researchers at Clemson disclosed the Russian connections behind the D.C. Weekly website in a report in December. After their disclosure, Russian narratives began appearing on another site that had been 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 name clearly is meant to evoke the city’s storied Daily News tabloid, were both created Jan. 18, according to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which monitors domains.
All the outlets use the same WordPress software to build the sites and, as a result, have similar designs.
