Mock news sites with Russian ties pop up across country

Meant to spread fake information, push propaganda

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.

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 US 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 US undersecretary of state for political affairs, discussing a shift in US 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.

The outlets have logos and names that evoke a bygone era of American journalism, an effort to create a semblance of authenticity. A Chicago Chronicle did operate from 1895 to 1907 before folding for a reason that would be all too familiar to struggling newspapers today: It was not profitable.

“The page is just there to look realistic enough to fool a casual reader into thinking they’re reading a genuine, USbranded article,” Linvill said.

‘The page is just there to look realistic enough to fool a casual reader.’

DARREN LINVILL

Co-director at Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub