Hundreds of websites posing as real local news outlets, often using AI-generated partisan articles, have popped up in recent months, according to a NewsGuard report.
The number of fake local news sites in the United States now exceeds the number of authentic local media, research group NewsGuard said in a report on Tuesday, warning of a potential explosion of disinformation five months before the US presidential election. Hundreds of websites posing as real local media, often using partisan articles generated by artificial intelligence, have emerged in recent months, according to the report, which identifies 1,265 in total.
By comparison, Northwestern University counted 1,213 local newspaper websites in the United States last year. “You now have a greater than 50% chance when you see a website claiming to cover local news that it is fake.”, the Newsguard report underlines. Nearly half of these partisan websites targeted key states that could swing the November presidential election in favor of Joe Biden or Donald Trump, according to online media outlet Axios. Among these fake media, Newsguard identifies a network of 167 Russian disinformation sites that the organization says are linked to John Mark Dougan, a former police officer from Florida who fled the United States to Moscow.
“Information deserts”
Other sites are supported by conservative groups as well as some with a more left-leaning orientation, according to the report. This emergence of fake media comes at a time when local newspapers are becoming increasingly rare in the United States, often due to economic problems. In a study last year, Northwestern University identified 204 of the 3,000 counties in the United States. “without newspapers, local digital sites, public radio newsrooms or ethnic publications”. Counties therefore qualified as “information desert”.
Newspapers continue to disappear at a rate of more than two per week in the US, according to the study, while the country has lost nearly two-thirds of its print journalists since 2005. “With traditional newspapers disappearing, fake sites rush to fill the void”writes Newsguard in its report. “As a result, millions of Americans are left without authentic local information”, the organization adds. These fake partisan propaganda sites used to rely on a legion of writers, but the advent of generative artificial intelligence means it is now much cheaper and much faster to create fake content that is hard to distinguish from genuine content.
