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Comment by wtallis | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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?

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.

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.

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