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According to experts, fake news represents a technological breakthrough in the Kremlin’s efforts to generate false and misleading narratives.
By Steven Lee Myers
In the exhausted field of journalism in the United States, a handful of Internet sites have popped up in recent weeks with names that suggest news close to home: D. C. Weekly, New York News Daily, Chicago Chronicle and a more recent sister publication, the Miami Chronicle.
In fact, they are not local media outlets at all. They are Russian creations, researchers and government officials say, meant to mimic genuine news agencies to publicize Kremlin propaganda by interspersing it with a bizarre 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 ahead of the American 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 online page first gave that impression on Feb. 26. Its slogan falsely claims to have broadcast “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. 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 recording is a crude fake, according to administration officials who would speak only anonymously to discuss intelligence matters.
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