In America’s exhausted journalism space, a few websites have popped up in recent weeks with names that suggest a focus on news closer to home: DC Weekly, New York News Daily, Chicago Chronicle and a younger sister publication, the Miami Chronicle. .
In fact, they are not local news organizations at all. They are Russian creations, researchers and government officials say, designed to mimic real news organizations to push Kremlin propaganda by weaving them into a strange 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 deceive unsuspecting American readers. The websites, researchers and officials said, could well be the foundation of an online network preparing to spread disinformation ahead of the US presidential election in November.
Patrick Warren, co-director at Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub, which has uncovered covert Russian disinformation efforts, said advances in artificial intelligence and other digital tools “have made it even easier to execute and the content they make even more targeted.”
The Miami Chronicle website first appeared on February 26. Its tagline falsely claims to be broadcasting “Florida News since 1937.”
Among some true reports, the site published a story last week about a “leaked recording” of Victoria Nuland, the US undersecretary of state for political affairs, discussing a shift in US support for Russia’s beleaguered opposition after his death. Russian dissident Aleksei A. Navalny. The recording is a gross fake, according to administration officials who would speak only anonymously to discuss intelligence matters.
The campaign, 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 2016 presidential election 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 military, but his continued operations underline the importance the Kremlin attaches to information warfare around the world. It is not clear who exactly took the helm.
“Putin would be a complete and utter idiot if he lets the network go down,” said Darren Linville, Mr. Warren’s colleague at Clemson. “The Prigozhin network is needed more than ever.”
Investigators at Clemson revealed the Russian connections behind the DC Weekly website in a report in December. After their disclosure, the Russian narratives began appearing on another website that had been set up in October, Clear Story News. Since then, new stores have popped up.
The websites of the Chicago Chronicle and the New York News Daily, whose name is clearly meant to refer to the city’s historic Daily News tabloid, were both launched on Jan. 18, according to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which tracks sectors.
All the stores use the same WordPress software to build the sites and therefore have similar designs.
The stores have logos and names that harken back to a bygone era of American journalism, an attempt to create a semblance of authenticity. A Chicago Chronicle ran from 1895 to 1907 before folding for a reason that would be all too familiar to struggling newspapers today: It wasn’t profitable.
They are also regularly updated with important breaking news, creating the impression of topicality at first glance. An article about the Supreme Court’s ruling on Mr. Trump’s eligibility to remain on the Colorado primary ballot appeared on the Miami Chronicle’s website hours after the ruling.
In other ways, the web pages are poorly constructed, even incomplete in parts. The “about” page for the Miami Chronicle, for example, is filled with Lorem ipsum, the Latin virtual text. Some of the images on the site have file names from the original Russian. (None of the sites publish working contact information.)
The point isn’t to trick a discerning reader into diving deeper into the site, let alone signing up, Mr. Linville said. Instead, the goal is to lend an aura of credibility to social media posts that spread misinformation.
The effort follows a pattern the Kremlin has used in the past: laundering allegations that first appear online through smaller news organizations. These reports spread again online and are appearing in even more news organizations, including Russia’s state news agencies and television networks.
“The page is there to look realistic enough to fool a casual reader into thinking they’re reading a genuine US-branded article,” Mr Linville said.
DC Weekly published a series of stories on the Kremlin starting in August, according to the Clemson study. One involved a false claim that the wife of Ukrainian 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 site claims to have a staff of 17 journalists, but they appear to be made up. The biography of the author of this story, named Jessica Devlin, used as a 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 the author until the auditors came to her.
Other articles appearing on the sites appear to have been lifted from actual news organizations, including Reuters and Fox News, or from English-language news outlets of Russian state media, such as RT. Some stories inadvertently include instructions or responses from one of OpenAI’s chatbots, Linvill and Warren wrote in the study.
The New York News Daily recently published a story about alleged US plans to interfere in the Russian elections this month, 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 at X. The New York News Daily published an article about what it purported to be a thread announcing a $115 million Hollywood blockbuster for Mr. Zelensky. The user on X was named Brian Wilson and described as an associate producer at Paramount Pictures.
The account has been posted to X only 85 times, the vast majority of them reposting movies over two days in February. 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. They were followed last week by two more that featured actual footage of actors Chuck Norris and Dolph Lundgren manipulated to appear to wish him success in the film.
The videos appear to be from Cameo, the celebrity greeting app, which was featured in an earlier Russian campaign revealed by Microsoft in December.
A spokeswoman for Paramount Pictures said no one named Brian Wilson worked at the studio. A Cameo spokesperson said Monday that the company was not aware of the videos, but added: “As a general rule, when posts that use abusive content sourced from Cameo are brought to our attention, we request that they be removed from that platform.” Later that day, the two videos were banned on the X account for copyright infringement. X later suspended the account.
Posts about the film were widely shared on Telegram. Many users cited the real New York Daily News as the source and said it highlighted the misuse of Western financial aid in Ukraine’s war against Russia. The narrative was also reinforced by outlets previously linked to Russian intelligence services, including NewsFront and Politnavigator, said Clint Watts, general manager of Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center.
Articles typically receive hundreds of shares on various platforms, including X, Facebook and Telegram, as well as Reddit, Gab and Truth Social, although exact reach is difficult to measure. In total, they could theoretically reach thousands, even millions, of readers.
“This is absolutely a prelude to the kind of interference we’re going to see in the election cycle,” Mr. Linville said. “It’s cheap, highly targeted and obviously effective.”
Jeanne Noonan DelMundo contributed to the report.
