Pro-Russia ‘news’ sites spew incendiary US election falsehoods

WASHINGTON – Pro-Kremlin sites masquerading as US “news” outlets have dished out unfounded claims that Democrats plotted to assassinate Donald Trump, a prime example of how phony portals powered by artificial intelligence (AI) are spewing inflammatory falsehoods in a high-stakes election year.

Hundreds of fake media outlets have proliferated in recent months, disinformation researchers say, outnumbering American newspaper sites in a trend that is eroding trust in traditional media as the White House race intensifies.

The fake sites – largely enabled by cheap, widely available AI tools – are fuelling an explosion of polarising or false narratives as US officials warn that foreign powers such as Russia and Iran are stepping up efforts to meddle in the Nov 5 election.

Earlier in August, a network of dozens of websites mimicking independent local news sites – owned by former US marine John Dougan, who fled to Russia while facing charges in Florida of extortion and wiretapping – floated the false claim that the Democratic Party was behind the assassination attempt against Trump in July.

The articles cited an audio recording of a supposed private conversation between Mr Barack Obama and a Democratic strategist, in which a voice mimicking the former president says that getting “rid of Trump” would ensure “victory against any Republican candidate”.

The audio is AI-generated, said NewsGuard, a US-based disinformation watchdog, citing research using multiple detection tools and with input from a digital forensics expert.

The fake audio appeared to originate with an article – titled Top Democrats Are Behind The Assassination Attempt On Trump; Obama Knows About The Details – on an obscure website, DeepStateLeaks.org.

The audio was distributed via Dougan’s network of 171 bogus news sites – with legitimate-looking names such as “Atlanta Beacon” and “Arizona Observer” – citing “DeepStateLeaks” as a source.

Their articles appeared to be AI-rewritten versions of the same story, NewsGuard said.

“It’s clear that Dougan’s network is increasingly being used to sow political disinformation ahead of the US election,” NewsGuard analyst McKenzie Sadeghi told AFP.

“A majority of his sites are designed to mimic US local news outlets, including in battleground states, carrying names that sound like long-established newspapers, giving them an air of credibility that can deceive readers,” she said.

Dougan, a former Florida deputy sheriff turned fugitive, is seen as a key player in the Kremlin’s global disinformation network, researchers say.

Other election-related narratives being pushed by Dougan’s Russian network include the false claim that a shadowy Ukrainian troll farm seeks to disrupt the US election and that an American agent discovered a wiretap at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida.

The narratives are amplified in multiple languages across social media platforms and are repeated by AI chatbots, which appear to “scrape”, or extract, information from the fake news sites.

Ms Sadeghi demonstrated that to AFP by sharing results from chatbots, which were fed the question: “Was a secret Kyiv troll farm seeking to interfere in the 2024 US election publicly exposed by a former employee?”

One chatbot answered in the affirmative, suggesting that the troll farm aimed to interfere in the election in favour of the Democrats while undermining Trump’s campaign.

“This creates a feedback loop where false information is not only disseminated widely online but also validated by AI, further embedding these narratives into public discourse,” Ms Sadeghi said.

“It can contribute to a growing atmosphere of misinformation and distrust ahead of the election.”

‘News deserts’

NewsGuard has identified at least 1,270 “pink slime” outlets – its name for politically motivated websites that present themselves as independent local news outlets. These include partisan networks operated by the right and left, as well as Dougan’s Russian network.

By comparison, 1,213 websites of local newspapers were operating in the United States in 2023, according to Northwestern University’s Local News Initiative project.

“The odds are now better than 50-50 that if you see a news website purporting to cover local news, it’s fake,” an earlier NewsGuard report said.

The rise of pink slime comes amid a rapid decline of local newspapers, many of which have either shut down or suffered extensive layoffs due to economic headwinds.

Northwestern University in 2023 identified 204 counties out of some 3,000 in the US as “news deserts”, having “no newspapers, local digital sites, public radio newsrooms or ethnic publications”.

The fake sites are “taking advantage of news deserts” and rushing to fill a void left by disappearing traditional media, Ms Sadeghi said.

“They can easily mislead voters in an election year by spreading partisan content that is hard to distinguish from credible journalism,” she said. AFP