The New York Times reported on Thursday that several sites disguising themselves as local news outlets are actually spreading “Kremlin propaganda.”
Reporter Steven Lee Myers wrote about sites with names like “D.C. Weekly, the New York News Daily, the Chicago Chronicle and a newer sister publication, the Miami Chronicle” that had the appearance of being connected to “an online network primed to surface disinformation ahead of the American presidential election in November.” Myers spoke to researchers and unnamed government officials for his report about the handful of “fake news organizations” — about five — that “represent a technological leap in [Russia’s] efforts to find new platforms to dupe unsuspecting American readers.”
Myers described the findings:
The campaign, the 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.
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