In America’s depleted journalism landscape, several websites have emerged in recent weeks with names that suggest a focus on news closer to home: DC Weekly, New York News Daily, the Chicago Chronicle and a newer sister publication, the Miami Chronicle.
In fact, they are not local news organizations. They are Russian creations, researchers and government officials say, meant to mimic actual news organizations to push Kremlin propaganda by interweaving it with an 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 step in its efforts to find new platforms. to deceive unsuspecting American readers. The sites, researchers and officials said, could be the cornerstones of an online network poised to release disinformation ahead of the American presidential election in November.
Patrick Warren, a co-director at Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub, which has exposed hidden Russian disinformation efforts, said advances in artificial intelligence and other digital tools “have made it easier to do and to make the content they produce is more targeted.”
The Miami Chronicle website first appeared on Feb. 26. Its tagline falsely claims to have delivered “Florida News since 1937.”
Amid some real reporting, the site published a story last week about a “leaked audio recording” of Victoria Nuland, the US under secretary of state for political affairs, discussing the shift in American support for imminent Russian opposition after the death of the Russian dissident. Alexei A. Navalny. The recording was a crude fake, according to administration officials who would speak only on condition of anonymity 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 the 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 the continuation of his operations underscores the Kremlin’s importance in the fighting. of its information worldwide. It is not clear who exactly took the helm.
“Putin would be a complete and utter idiot to let the network collapse,” said Darren Linvill, Mr. Warren’s partner at Clemson. “He needs the Prigozhin network more than ever.”
Clemson researchers revealed Russian connections behind the DC Weekly website in a December report. After their disclosure, Russian accounts began appearing on another site created in October, Clear Story News. Since then, new outlets have appeared.
The Chicago Chronicle and New York News Daily websites, whose name is clearly meant to evoke the story of the city’s Daily News tabloid, were both created on January 18, according to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which tracking domains.
All outlets use the same WordPress software to build sites and, as a result, have similar designs.
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 operated from 1895 to 1907 before folding for a reason that will be familiar to all struggling newspapers today: It wasn’t profitable.
They also regularly update on major breaking news, creating at first glance the impression of topicality. An article about the Supreme Court’s decision about Mr. Trump’s eligibility to remain on the primary ballot in Colorado appeared on the Miami Chronicle site within hours of the decision.
In other ways, websites are poorly constructed, even incomplete in parts. The “about” page for the Miami Chronicle, for example, is full of Lorem ipsum, the Latin-based dummy text. Some of the images on the site have file names from the original Russian. (None of the sites posted working contact information.)
The goal isn’t to fool a savvy reader into diving deeper into the website, let alone subscribing, Mr. Linvill said. The goal instead is to give an aura of credibility to social media posts that spread disinformation.
The effort follows a pattern the Kremlin has used in the past: money-laundering claims that first appear online through lesser news organizations. Those reports again spread online and appeared in more news organizations, including Russian state news agencies and television networks.
“The page is just there to look realistic enough to fool a casual reader into thinking they’re reading a real, US-branded article,” Mr. Linvill said.
DC Weekly has published a number of Kremlin narratives since August, according to the Clemson study. One included a false claim that the wife of Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, bought more than $1.1 million worth of jewelry at a Cartier store in New York during her visit to the United Nations in September.
The site claims to have a staff of 17 journalists, but they appear to be fictitious. The biography of the author of that story, called Jessica Devlin, was used as a profile picture of a picture of Judy Batalion, the author of a best-selling book about Jewish women who fought against Nazis. said Ms. Battalion that he had never heard of the site or the author until the fact checkers reached out to him.
Other articles appearing on the sites appear to have been lifted from real news organizations, including Reuters and Fox News, or from Russian state media’s English-language news agencies, such as RT. Some stories inadvertently 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 American plans to interfere in Russia’s election this month, with the winner, Mr. Putin, is a foregone conclusion. It was circulated 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 in X. The New York News Daily posted an article about what it said was a thread announcing the $115 million Hollywood blockbuster about to Mr. Zelensky. The user at X is called Brian Wilson and is described as an associate producer at Paramount Pictures.
The account only posted 85 times on X, most of them reposting about movies over two days in February. A week later, the user suddenly announced a deal to make a biopic of Mr. Zelensky — “The Price of Victory” — in a series of posts. Those were followed last week by two more featuring actual videos of actors Chuck Norris and Dolph Lundgren being manipulated to look like they wanted him to succeed in the film.
The videos appear to have come from Cameo, the celebrity greeting app, which was caught in an earlier Russian campaign disclosed by Microsoft in December.
A spokesperson for Paramount Pictures said no one named Brian Wilson worked at the studio. A spokesperson for Cameo said Monday that the company was not aware of the videos but added, “As a general rule, when posts that misuse Cameo-sourced content are brought to our attention, we request their departure from the platform in question.” Later that day, two videos on the X account were blocked for violating intellectual property rights. X later suspended the account.
Posts about the movie went viral on Telegram. Many users cited the actual New York Daily News as the source and said it highlighted the abuse of Western financial aid in Ukraine’s war against Russia. The narrative was also fueled by outlets formerly linked to Russian intelligence agencies, including NewsFront and Politnavigator, said Clint Watts, general manager of Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center.
Articles typically get hundreds of posts on various platforms, including X, Facebook and Telegram, as well as Reddit, Gab and Truth Social, though it’s hard to measure the exact reach. Together, they can reach thousands of readers, even millions in theory.
“This is absolutely prelude to the kind of interference we’re going to see in this election cycle,” Mr. Linvill said. “It’s cheap, highly targeted and obviously effective.”
Jeanne Noonan DelMundo contributed reporting.
