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.
The purpose is not to fool a discerning reader into diving deeper into the website, let alone subscribing, Mr. Linvill said. The goal instead is to lend an aura of credibility to posts on social media spreading the disinformation.
👆👆👆
And it is quite likely to work; only a tiny fraction of people click a link, let alone try to figure out if the site is legit.
Yep. That’s why I’m glad a lot of the news communities require headlines to match the article title, forbid link shorteners, and have credibility minimums.
Granted, we’re a tiny subset of social media.
Also why I added MBFC badges to the Lemmy UI I maintain.
@jordanlund@lemmy.world might not be a bad idea to set up a bot to automatically post MBFC evals of post link domains, in the interest of helping to quickly draw attention to sort of thing on this community. And even if it’s not a serious problem, I don’t think it’s a bad idea to do something like that by default for communities like this.
The key thing I’ve found with a lot of questionable sites is they are such a low profile, they fly under the radar. MBFC and other sites don’t have a rating on them because they are too new or too low profile.
Lately, our big challenge has been spam. Bots spamming links to central24 dot online. I don’t want to give them even an unintentional link. ;)
But if you look them up, they kind of came out of nowhere with no bias or reliability rating. The parent company is something called “ZwadTech” so same there.
There was another one that hit World News that looked OK, even though the design looked like a crappy blog site. I initially allowed it because we don’t get a lot of news out of Africa and it’s underserved. I was able to vet the story, which was well written and accurate. Same deal, tiny site, nothing on the bias sites.
Then it turned out it was just copy/pasted from another source, so, yeah, that got removed.
For what it’s worth, it’s great to hear that you guys are doing your best to stay on top of this stuff. I appreciate it, and I’m sure the vast majority of the community does as well.
I also use Biasly if MBFC doesn’t have a record for a particular source. They don’t cover everything, either, and they’re not as comprehensive (and are AI-based), but it’s a somewhat decent second source.I need to re-evaluate Biasly. On further review, it’s not entirely clear how they arrive at their ratings for factual reporting and credibility besides “a magic AI does it”.
I’ve started using https://ground.news a lot. They use MBFC for accuracy/bias, and also group news articles on the same news item, so you can see the differences in bias cross the spectrum (as well as the variable titles used). That shows if only one side is reporting on an issue, or how editorialized the article titles are.
(I’m not a marketing person for ground.news, I just like them)
This is what got me to finally leave Facebook. The amount of times I felt the need to fact check something a friend or family member posted was getting out of hand. Most of the time they’d ignore me or delete my comment.
These will be on Lemmy in no time.
It’s sad that I can already anticipate which handful of accounts they’re likely to come from (excluding brand new accounts that pop up en mass, though the automod gets a lot of those)
https://lemm.ee/u/yogthos@lemmygrad.ml
This one for sure. They love to post RT and Presstv.ir links on the regular as well as downright word-salad domains that I’ve never seen before.
.ml
Yeah, no surprise. Bummer for the legit users who signed up there.
Yeah sadly I have seen a few already
“Spate of mock news sites with russian ties pops up AGAIN.” Ftfy, NYT. You chose not to go there. Again. Btw.
I bet they all have been posted on lemmygrad.ml the last few weeks.
Goddamn they’re hardcore with that shit. Makes me wonder what we don’t see.
Election season!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
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.
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.
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.”
Amid some true reports, the site published a story last week about a “leaked audio recording” of Victoria Nuland, the U.S. under secretary of state for political affairs, discussing a shift in American support for Russia’s beleaguered opposition after the death of the Russian dissident Aleksei A. Navalny.
The campaign, the experts and officials say, appears to involve remnants of the media empire once controlled by Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, a former associate of President Vladimir V. Putin whose troll factory, the Internet Research Agency, interfered in the 2016 presidential election between Donald J. Trump and Hillary Rodham Clinton.
One included a false claim that the wife of Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, bought more than $1.1 million worth of jewelry at the Cartier store in New York during his visit to the United Nations in September.
The original article contains 1,377 words, the summary contains 254 words. Saved 82%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
I could not find any of those websites on 3 different search engines.
Major search engines in the west cooperate with US intelligence agencies to limit the spread of stuff like this.
I assume this is one of them https://www.whois.com/whois/miamichron.com
Good find, thanks.
That website is laughably bad. Check out the lorum ipsum on the ‘About’ page. Check out the title - “Giving the florida news”??! I can’t believe Russian psyops are this bad, when they have rt.com, sputnik, zerohedge and many more all running very smoothly.
This has to be a feint. It’s a fake, to make their actual psyops more believable.
Maybe I’m being too 6D chess about this.
Several of the articles are also stolen from other sites like yahoo and msn news to make it try and appear legit and fill in some content.
And at the bottom of the page it’s the “Chicago Chronicle”
And the whole page template is from here https://demos.codetipi.com/zeen-news/
I guess their interns have to start somewhere.
I guess lol!
I tried chicagochron.com to see if that was still up, but it brings me to a “The domain has been suspended due to a complaint or violation of LiquidNet Ltd Acceptable Use Policy (AUP).” page
