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Comment by jka | Hacker News Reader

It's fairly remarkable to see how weaponized misinformation is becoming.

Here's a snippet from Wikipedia[1] detailing the background behind the already-very-dubiously-named Local Government Information Services -- which is in no way a federally (or even regionally) accredited institution:

"Locality Labs published Hinsdale School News, a newspaper that masqueraded as the student publication of a high school in Hinsdale, Illinois by using the logo of Hinsdale Township High School District 86. In March 2019, the publication released a number of articles opposing a Hinsdale referendum that would increase the school district's budget by $140 million.[1] Officials from District 86 sent a cease and desist letter to Franklin Archer, LGIS, and other related companies, claiming that their publication of the Hinsdale School News was deceptive and violated trademark law.[5]"

This is a wake-up call for authenticity.

Regardless of whether foreign influence is involved -- and it can be very challenging to determine whether it is -- U.S. nationals are taking actions that imitate authority without possessing it.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Government_Information_S...

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There is already an ongoing and massive automated astroturfing campaign using hundreds of faked local news websites (news|times|standard|reporter|record|today.com) run by Metric Media, Locality Labs, Record Inc. and possibly others [1]. This reopen*.com wave is just more of the same, but I thank you for making the connection obvious to me.

There is also an ongoing crowdsourced investigation that is committed to exposing these misinformation campaigns that I'm sure would welcome your assistance [2].

[1] - https://github.com/MassMove/AttackVectors/blob/master/LocalJ...

[2] - https://www.reddit.com/r/MassMove/

Krebs links to a google doc in the article as well here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1k-GgWMNhg1se5302MCBh...

To note, Krebs has ~700 sites listed. Go ahead and ctrl+F for a city near you to see. The format of each of them is pretty cookie-cutter but the articles and pictures had a lot of work put into them.

For instance, here is one: https://metroeastsun.com/

Looking at this, I would never suspect that it was just a fraud. Looking at the headlines for the articles, it's pretty corruption heavy and seems to have a thing about government workers being paid, also a lot of white people smiling or pointing fingers while in suits. TinEye reports that the few photos that I bothered to check are all unique, whatever that may mean. Googling for lines in a few of the articles gets you back to that site and not others. Still, it's not even remotely out of line, just a bit odd when you look at it.

But we know it's not just odd, we know it's fake news. Even a bit of digging on the articles and photos points to it passing a sniff test. Without Krebs telling me that it stunk like a fish market, I'd never know.

I checked a few links listed in that MassMove github repository around the Bay Area in CA, including:

  https://sanjosestandard.com/

  https://sanmateosun.com/

  https://sanfransun.com/

I wouldn't characterize these as fake news, they just appear to be massively automated sites generated from public press releases from local government. In several of the articles they list the byline as "By Press Release submission". So it appears they aren't trying to be too deceptive, and if you search the text from the articles is does link back to the actual press release from a real .gov site in that locality.

Also looking at the bylines from metric media news service itself ( just append /author/metric-media-news-service to the main domain ), I would have expected a more discernible pattern of articles biased towards a particular viewpoint, but again, I didn't see anything too nefarious.

So at first glance, it looks like a reasonable local site albeit very cookie cutter, and primarily regurgitations of press releases from local official govs. And at second glance, it doesn't appear to be much worse than that.

NOW having said all of that, I can easily see how this can be turned sideways very easily and quickly by the site maintainers. If you're actually able to build up a good readership with some of this 'basic' content, then come election time or some other critical moment where influence is important, you can easily seed more biased content into the articles. And these don't necessarily need to be blatantly 'fake', they can just be slanted a certain way. They could certainly go full bore and insert some really fake content in there once in awhile.

The sheer magnitude of it all is impressive, taken in isolation these sites would seem legitimate but seeing them all side by side and seeing the content laid out it becomes painfully obvious there's an ulterior motive to it all.

Thanks to the parent comment for making me ( and hopefully more of us ) aware of this type of activity.

> I wouldn't characterize these as fake news, they just appear to be massively automated sites generated from public press releases from local government.

That's just filler: low-quality automated content so that the site appears genuine at first glance. These sites are not intended to attract regular readership. They're a context into which propaganda pieces can be inserted and be linked to on social media. Readers are expected to hit the site only for specific articles, and to not be motivated to explore much further. If these sites were a genuine attempt to make money by peddling local news, they would have more ads and at least some mention of weather or traffic.

How do you know that the motives of the site operators are what you think? For instance it could be that this is a network of ad-revenue generating sites and has nothing to do with civil protest movements...

https://www.dw.com/en/disinformation-sites-generate-over-200...

The sites I've looked at simply don't have enough advertisements for that to be at all plausible. Ads on these sites are so sparse that it's eerie compared to legitimate news sites. Only a small fraction of the content on these sites is going to get any real traffic, and without a regular audience base the handful of ads spots they do offer are not going to bring in much money. I counted just three ads on the "Metro East Sun" homepage and only two on their current top non-bot story—one of those ads was from the Trump campaign.

And even if they do expect to turn a profit off these sites, the clear patterns in their non-bot content need to be explained. Why do all of these sites seem to be focused on mingling Republican propaganda with their filler content? Why not have some sites featuring clickbait for a different audience?

If they are not going for ad revenue as you indicate above (sparse ads, at best) are they instead going for a huge number of "references"? I.e., do they feel (or have they A/B tested) that their miss-information campaign can be more convincing if their initial "contact" can cite a bunch of "references" that all seem to support the "issue" being pushed in that initial contact?

I.e., presume their real aim is some kind of initial email contact, possibly soliciting donations/support for some 'cause'. If that contact email can reference ten of these fake websites, all of which support the point made in the initial email, does it increase the rate of donation/support return from that initial contact email?

A lot of the non-bot content seems to be fairly local stuff: hit pieces against local Democrats or praise for local Republicans. The underlying issues are similar, but the articles themselves don't seem to lend themselves to being aggregated in that manner. Plus, it doesn't seem like a good idea to try to present a false consensus when all the sites you're linking to look like the same site.

And I highly doubt that they're focusing on email as the means of reaching new users. This clickbait is meant to spread via Facebook posts.

> hit pieces against local Democrats or praise for local Republicans.

This suggests another possible reason. Those behind them have found that if the 'fake' site appears to be 'local' enough, it will be seen as more reliable and/or it is more likely to get "liked" (given your "spread via Facebook posts"). Possibly their A/B testing has shown that fake 'local' stuff gets more spreading on FB?

I don't think that's "another" possible reason so much as you're closing in on the original accusation. The reddit group linked upthread refers users to this article explaining these sites: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/31/upshot/fake-local-news.ht...

All you're missing out on at this point is the obvious partisan motivation.

Can we just take a moment to appreciate that a sites legitimacy is questioned because the site isn't crippled by ads to the point of being nearly unusable? That's a really unfortunate state of affairs. Especially since I don't think small sites trying to build an audience can afford to cripple themselves to the same degree with ads as bigger sites can.

One reason I can think of for increased Republican content is because of outrage economics. They tend to generate more clicks. It's also something that isn't catered to by the big news networks. Smaller sites I'm regularly visiting for over ten years have also shifted in this direction and those type of articles always generate more comments than other ones, so the tactic seemingly works.

> I wouldn't characterize these as fake news, they just appear to be massively automated sites generated from public press releases from local government.

Correct. Some are completely automated using state/county filters of public APIs, while others are word for word scrapings of Facebook posts from relevant local groups.

> NOW having said all of that, I can easily see how this can be turned sideways very easily and quickly by the site maintainers. If you're actually able to build up a good readership with some of this 'basic' content, then come election time or some other critical moment where influence is important, you can easily seed more biased content into the articles.

Already happening. Besides the automated posts there is also what appears to be original content written by professional content writers. Some of the websites listed in the spreadsheet will only have automated posts as you've found, but look further and you'll see closer to a 50/50 split on the sites for some of the larger cities. What's more concerning here is that some of these authors are submitting their work to sites in completely disparate areas, and own accounts on all of the websites even if they don't write there.

> The sheer magnitude of it all is impressive, taken in isolation these sites would seem legitimate but seeing them all side by side and seeing the content laid out it becomes painfully obvious there's an ulterior motive to it all.

My understanding of this original content from some of the MassMove discussions is that it's trying to build public opinion where there is none to eventually get laws pushed and signed - so effectively astroturfing.

I imagine these sites need to look/be legitimate in order to be approved to buy advertising on FB. Automating them from press releases is a cheap way to do that. FB does some rigorous checks on ad-sets - I’ve had to honeypot their process to debug why on earth they kept rejecting a site (was an automated scraper flagging it? Or was a manual reviewer rejecting it after clicking around? Was the content, user experience, or something else in violation of FB ad policies?): https://facebook.com/policies/ads

Anyways, if these sites want to buy advertising on FB they need to pass this scrutiny. Would be curious to see which urls/content on these sites MassMove sees as nefarious. What landed these sites on the list?

Edit: Oh I see, there’s a short list of site operators.

This content was seen as nefarious:

https://www.reddit.com/r/MassMove/comments/fzunwk/caught_a_d...

They were running ads by LGIS on Facebook for that specific Corona story: https://www.facebook.com/ChicagoCityWire/posts/8442905359819...

Rush Limbaugh's quotes the article ChicagoCityWire.com:

https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2020/04/10/two-stories-in...

And the ads got people to post the article to reddit repeatedly: https://www.reddit.com/r/MassMove/comments/g0icy3/rmassmove_...

Using automated tools to bring easily-scraped news to people is a good way to enure deniability and keep an audience around. Aggregators are wonderful homepages. Then, occasionally, you can (either by accidental scrape or design), push highly biased content that is provably false, and it will be a subtle signal in innocent-seeming noise.

Not saying that's what's happening here, just saying that an abundance of innocuous content does not make a site unbiased and trustworthy, just as it does not make it immediately suspicious.

Looks like they used the bootstrap.js blog example as a template-- compare with https://getbootstrap.com/docs/4.4/examples/blog/

I see tracking via facebook, linkedin, quantcast, matomo, and locallabs.com, and user monitoring via newrelic js-agent.

> I wouldn't characterize these as fake news, they just appear to be massively automated sites generated from public press releases from local government.

In googling a few lines here and there in the articles, I couldn't find a way back to other content. I'm not saying they aren't using other documents as the seed for an article, but the writing appears to be unique upon a quick gut-check. Additionally, the photos appear to be unique as well. Again, super quick checks on my part.

To me, that means these things fit the bill of 'fake news' perfectly [0]. Maybe it was a very good bot that wrote the articles with a very good GAN image creator, maybe it was a mechanical turk that wrote them for ~$0.10. I don't really care. To me, it's fake news.

[0] Per Webster's: "False stories that appear to be news, spread on the internet or using other media, usually created to influence political views or as a joke"

When opening metroeastsun.com one is greeted with the following:

>Help us continue our fight against cronyism, corruption and profligate government borrowing & spending.

Well okay then.

2 things stood out for me which raised questions as a non-American.

1) The quality of the site - are the websites of local US papers usually this decently made? Even if it's just a random WP theme. I was under the impression that they were still perpetually 10 years behind the curve. See https://www.fredericknewspost.com/ for example.

2) The real estate section looks fishy as all hell. Why would they include something like that?

As to 1), yes, this is about par for the course. Most local news sites are of near this quality.

As to 2), I've no clue. Maybe they are scraping the MLS feeds or Redfin's site in order to appear more legitimate. Honestly, it does feel more legitimate to me as real estate is very serious business. Fake news of c. 2016 didn't have a real estate section per my remembering of them.

Thanks for the links, this is good stuff!

> very-dubiously-named Local Government Information Services

Not trying to be arch here: Federal Express is an equally hinky name, isn't it? I've always thought it was confusingly, well, federal-sounding.

I'm not American and because of the name I've always assumed federal express was government-related.

And don't confuse UPS (United Parcel Service) and USPS (United States Postal Service).

Then there's the band "The Postal Service" that got a cease and desist from USPS to stop using their trademark.

However it had a happy ending: the United States Postal Service -- the real one, as in stamps and letters -- signed an agreement with Sub Pop granting a free license to use the name in exchange for working to promote using the mail. Future copies of the album and the group's follow-up work will have a notice about the trademark, while the federal Postal Service will sell the band's CD's on its Web site, potentially earning a profit. The band may do some television commercials for the post office.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/06/arts/music/postal-service...

For the longest time I thought these were the same companies

Or Uninteruptable Power Supply. When I got my first job, I always wondered why our company designated the UPS with their own room on the floor map...

This is fascinating; I had no idea that non-Americans thought this. Every American knows it's a private company and most know it's a classic rags-to-riches story started by a guy named Fred. It simply never occurred to me that anyone might assume it was a government entity, even though now I get why.

Oh, come on. It's plausible that most Americans know it's a private company, but most people do not know it was started by a guy named Fred. (or do you mean a guy named Fed?)

Frederal Express don't have the same ring to it.

I don’t know, Busby, I think you’re onto something ;

Maybe I should have said "Americans my age." Fred Smith got a lot of news coverage in the 80s. He used to be a case study in business schools.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_W._Smith

...and apparently I was wrong about the rags part.

He did get close to rags in the middle there

Well, then, clearly it should be called Frederal Expresss.

A long time ago when I lived in Pakistan, the local franchise holder for Federal Express processed and handled visa applications to United States. The final interview if needed was still conducted by Consulate employees but everything else was Federal Express. I want to be clear that nobody wa strying to imply that Fedex was a government agency but it acted almost like USPS does for US passports.

USPS has a contract with Fedex to carry its mail, by the way, so the US passports are also most likely handled by Fedex at some point.

Government Employees Insurance Company

Their products were originally only offered to/available to government employees. The name was purely - and accurately - descriptive. There was no intention to deceive, in this case.

Yup, GEICO.

It hasn’t been called federal express for decades.

Sort of a difference without distinction given it still has the Fed part, which is a pretty common shorthand for things that are, well, federal.

yeah, now we call it fedex, very clear what that means ;-)

Same goes for the Federal Reserve, which is why there's so many conspiracy theories around it:

>The stockholders in the 12 regional Federal Reserve Banks are the privately owned banks that fall under the Federal Reserve System. These include all national banks (chartered by the federal government) and those state-chartered banks that wish to join and meet certain requirements. About 38 percent of the nation’s more than 8,000 banks are members of the system, and thus own the Fed banks.

https://www.factcheck.org/2008/03/federal-reserve-bank-owner...

The Federal Reserve is not misleadingly named. It was created by an act of the US Congress. The board is appointed by the President and the Congress sets their salaries. It’s completely appropriate for it to bear the word “Federal” in it’s name.

The conspiracy theories are because people make up stories to fill in what they don’t understand.

The FRB is often described as "private", but it really isn't, certainly not in the way that FedEx is. It:

1. Has the website https://www.federalreserve.gov/ 2. Seems to be considered a federal agency, given that it is subject to FOIA request 3. Was created by the federal government 4. Is run by a Presidentially appointed chairman

...etc....etc...

Twitter got sued back in the day by Tony LaRussa, former coach of the St. Louis Cardinals, for letting people impersonate his account—and thus the verified blue check was born.

So now impersonation is just getting more nuanced, on Twitter, FB, DNS, Skype, Zoom, robocalls, Tinder, you name it.

If someone impersonates someone in person in the US, it’s probably a fine or an arrest. If someone does it on the internet, well, more often than not we can’t tell and even if we do know who did it, we may try them in the US but if outside, not much of a chance.

Why do you think we haven’t demanded that tech companies and governments solve this problem?

> Why do you think we haven’t demanded that tech companies and governments solve this problem?

Privacy is almost always the answer to that one. Either that, or "to protect people from totalitarian governments". Honestly, I understand that, but I'm disappointed that no one goes further and says "Hey, let's see if we can solve both problems at the same time whilst maintaining security and privacy."

Easy solution.

Verified works get signed by their content maker.

Tony LaRussa is verified. Twitter issues him a cert. All of Tony LaRussa's works are signed with that cert.

Revoke the cert if there's ever a problem. Not really Tony LaRussa. Someone hacks his accounts. He passes away. Etc.

Unsigned works still permitted. But everyone knows no one claims the work as their own.

It is generally not illegal to impersonate someone. You will only be fined or arrested if there is an actual crime involved, like fraud.

I think it's disinformation at this point, not misinformation.

"This is a wake-up call for authenticity."

Emphatic agreement.

Signed work is journalism. Unsigned work is gossip, propaganda.

Much too much effort is being expended on determining truthiness. Pure futility.

Meanwhile, I haven't found any efforts by content providers to sign their works. So consumers can have some sense of provenance.

Use trusted certs. Any one caught impersonating someone else has their certs revoked.

Thank you for pointing it out. I am here and I had no idea about it. And just before anyone jumps in saying it is nothing new, note the industrial scale at which it is happening and the impact it may be having. I know I trust local publications a little more.

I think far more concerning are the cases where the perpetrators are foreign entities.

The effect could be the same regardless of source, and the attribution could become fractally difficult depending on how many channels of influence are available to the perpetrator.

Personally, I'd recommend that people focus on the results of the actions that are taking place, and devise measures to lead or redirect those towards positive outcomes.

The time spent attempting to attribute nefarious outside actors -- even if you end up being correct -- could end up essentially wasted relative to the real-world impact that has occurred.

Edit: I'm not suggesting that attribution or recording provenance are not worthwhile. They are valuable, especially in future. But focus should remain on what is going to happen in the near-term as a result of real-world actions.

Foreign actors have different motivations— and most importantly, don’t have to live in a country if they destroy it with terrible policies.

There are plenty of non-foreigners who:

1. Have nefarious motivations.

2. Stand to benefit directly from the terrible policies they wish to enact.

You're making the mistake of thinking that just because they wear your colours, mean that they care about your team's success. They don't.

They do, however, appreciate the foreign/not-foreign red herring get used as a point of distraction.

This is also true of the very wealthy.

That’s pretty insightful, honestly.

I find more concerning this (from the article):

'A number of other sites — such as reopennc.com — seem to exist merely to sell t-shirts, decals and yard signs with such slogans as “Know Your Rights,” “Live Free or Die,” and “Facts not Fear.'

I mean, that marketing tools would be used for political gain was to be expected, but, it seems that we have arrived to a point where politics is used for marketing. One thing is to sell t-shirts with slogans and another is to create (or amplify) a movement in order to sell t-shirts, regardless of the consequences. I suppose that, as so many things, once you are inside the vortex it's difficult to tell the difference.

And maybe slightly more concerning still that those foreign entities may or may not be doing favors for domestic entities.

Step 1: Deflect.

How do you define "authenticity"?

Doesn't matter.

What matters is transparent process for issuing, revoking, adjudicating authentication.

Every authenticator can have their own process.

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