So I decided to take the really sophisticated step of doing a "link:www.milanomodaweekly.com" search on Google. It turned up this [1] page, and pretty much only that page. But that seems to explain what this probably is.
This looks like an amateur hour scam operation. Somebody sets up some sites that look vaguely passable (targeted at an audience who does not even speak the language on the site), auto-populates them with auto-translated Chinese newswire and blog stuff, local scraped stuff, etc. and then claims they're "major foreign media outlets", which they then sell access to for the riveting price of just 1.4 million won - about $1000. It looks like a modern take on something like a 419 scam, except I expect they probably do follow through on publishing whatever people submit!
Granted not as exciting a discovery as a shadowy influence operation with a super sexy nickname, but probably more accurate.
This is the key to many scams these days - you're not the person being scammed, you're a byproduct or accident.
E.g., all that pointless spam that doesn't even have a way to buy anything whatsoever? Spammers selling services to people who don't know what they're doing.
Did you miss the part in the article where these sites contain blatant pro-China propaganda, and ad hominem attacks on CCP political dissidents?
I did the same cursory look as you. Go to https://www[.]eiffelpost[.]com/?s=china with a VPN. It shows 24 pages of CGTN greatest hits. How you can interpret this to be anything other than a CCP psyop is beyond me.
It's disappointing to see this kind of dismissal on a forum of highly educated people. It's common knowledge that the Chinese government has a history of censoring information that shows them in a bad light, promoting largely false self-aggrandizing narratives, and attacking anyone who challenges them. It shouldn't be surprising at all that the internet outside of their great firewall is a major focus of their operations. Given a lack of direct sources to determine the truth of the situation, I will always lean towards believing that this is part of their established modus operandi, rather than minimizing it by claiming it's just another "amateur hour scam operation".
These are not Chinese news and blogs. These sites are created in the language and region of other countries, sometimes by scraping the content of other local sites, and then filling them with the usual Chinese propaganda. Chinese people are not the target audience.
The target audience seems to be Koreans who want to market their [whatever] in e.g. France, but neither know French nor anything at all about France. I found the link where you can buy access to the EiffelPost site you mentioned here: https://kmong.com/gig/399972
I assume you didn't check out the link earlier. Basically it's some sort of a Korean craigslist/ebay type site. The site itself is complete legit - Amazon did a case study of them here. [1] The seller/scammer, "Excelsior Partners" claims to be affiliated with governments, advertising agencies, and so on. And they guarantee publication in more than 10 "major French media outlets." They even offer to take care of translation for you, with their "direct partnership with a professional translation agency." Heh. Of course those "major media sites" are all the ones the article from this thread is talking about.
They're just trying to fill out the site with enough junk that somebody who doesn't know the language, doesn't know the locale, and is naive enough to think you can buy guaranteed article placement in multiple major Western publications for $1k, might think it's real.
Alright. So the CCP is even lazier and doesn't bother with creating their own sites, but buys access to these branded localized sites, and posts their content that way. Or "Excelsior Partners" is just another CCP front, and those kmong listings are a scam in itself.
Otherwise, how would you explain 24 pages of CGTN propaganda?
In either case, it's a clear link to the CCP. This is no different to what they do on social media as well. They use all established platforms to broaden their reach.
> Did you miss the part in the article where these sites contain blatant pro-China propaganda, and ad hominem attacks on CCP political dissidents?
What does the irrelevant adjective “blatant” have to do with anything? And why is “ad hominem” significant when 95% of politics is about technically fallacious argumentation such as that?
Oh, a 10KUSD FB ad campaign bought by Kremlin and targeted at the US population? Obvious psyop, yes. Also completely irrelevant noise in the scheme of things, just like this apparent “amateur hour” operation.
It’s about having an appropriate response to “bad things”. There is no need to freak out about a few ants in the backyard.
> It's disappointing to see this kind of dismissal on a forum of highly educated people.
Of course. As “highly educated people” we are supposed to circle the wagons and irrationally blow apparent low-effort (again according to the OP) psyops out of proportion because it’s an enemy regime. That’s after all the primary ideological role of the “highly educated people” (loose source: Chomsky).
Seeing the screenshot of the headlines, "mimic" (HN title) is a different to "posing as" (article title). If I can extrapolate from 3 headlines screenshot there, the sites have generic boring looks (maybe they're Wordpress sites), but they pose to be a news site for Sevilla, Rome, or Milan. Whereas when "mimicking", I would expect them to be copying the design of well-known news sites (I've seen fake CNN-looking sites).
It's always amusing/depressing when people claim something, usually something fake-news-ey or propaganda) and link to one of these random Wordpress-looking sites as their "news source". I remember someone linking to a page that claimed that a map of the March 2011 Japanese tsunami effects measured throughout the Pacific[1] was a map of the radiation from the nuclear accident, so people do fall for it, because not everyone is as discerning as us super-clever HN readers. ;)
I'm not the submitter, but there is a length limit on post titles. I've run into this before with articles whose titles exceed that limit, and I've had to "edit" the titles to fit. I imagine the submitter had the same issue, and didn't catch the different connotation of "mimic" vs "posing as", which does seem to change the meaning some.
Dang: Do you think you could raise the length limit by 50 characters or so? Most of the problems I've had with title length limits seem to have been just a few words that I had to squeeze down..
meanwhile, a woman from Japan came to visit the David Brower Center in Berkeley soon after the meltdown, because someone there had been recording TEPCO and National Radiation Levels info since the Fukishima events. Those recordings were in dispute, they did not match. There was intense national interest, international science poking in, and in fact the public records were in dispute.
The anecdote here only says "I thought the website was this, and it turned out to be that" .. so many ways that small bit can fail. Very significant world event with actual conflicting information..
Nothing new, sadly. Before the 2016 and 2020 election, fake news farms in Macedonia made the rounds [1] - these were in it for the money, and in 2015 there were reports about Russian propaganda farms targeting Serbia and the rest of Europe [2].
Yes, back before You-Know-Who neutralized the phrase "fake news" by turning it into a generic insult to disparage legitimate news organizations, the big story was all these actual fake newspapers popping up, made to look legitimate, but actually pumping out nonsense and political propaganda instead. Suddenly the phenomenon just stopped getting reported on, and we now mostly forget that these fake sites even exist.
Yea, I've made it my general practice on HN to not even say the guy's name because whenever you do, your comment boards the upvote-downvote roller coaster, and I'm not going for controversy.
Oh please. Your Voldemort never had the power to neutralize that term. People who were clued-in enough to know about Fake News before Trump wasn’t swayed in their belief. And people who were blissfully aware of it (of reality) would just think that it was a new “Trump Thing” and then delude themselves into thinking that getting rid Trump would be the same as getting rid of Fake News (quotation marks may or may not apply).
In the U.S., rich people and political organizations are actually buying or setting up real newspapers in small towns so that when they post fake news on social media, they can reference a dead tree "news source" that is actually their own P.R. machine.
There have been a few articles about it in the real press (NYT, etc) over the last couple of years.
This is no different from the majority of US history. Partisan/slanted news outlets have been a thing in the US going back to the Revolution, on both sides of the aisle. It's often a reason why larger cities had multiple papers. One for each side.
As far as I can tell (from the other side of the Atlantic) most Americans seem to think that the Republican versus Democrat party system is provided for by either the constitution or god, or perhaps both, and that any deviation from two party politics is just that: deviation.
> This is no different from the majority of US history.
It is very different. I and many reading have been here for the time when it didn't happen this way, when the world was not drowning in disinformation.
Turning it into a binary question: 0) It doesn't exist at all, or 1) It exists, makes the question meaningless (and ironically is a common form of misinformation, and technique of disinformation). By binary reasoning, murder exists whether we have law enforcement or not, and cancer always exists so you might as well smoke cigars and work in a coal mine.
But what is the point of saying it's no different? Even if it were true, what do you conclude from that? Why make this argument?
I don't quite follow what that means in context, so I'll answer as if it's asked in isolation:
It's not the same at all. At least, IMHO: The volume of disinformation and misinformation is orders of magnitude greater than ever before, as is capability and quality:
1) Volume: The Internet reduces mass communication costs by orders of magnitude, of course, and similarly reduce wide-area communication costs, so people in Russia and China or anywhere can send disinfo to people in the US or UK or West Africa, etc. Also, computers greatly reduce the cost of producing disinfo, by automating it (and now GPTs reduce that mcuh further).
2) Capability: Before, mass communication required going through narrow gate with a gatekeeper. You had to get it on the evening news broadcast or in the newspaper. The gatekeepers were experts who exercised judgement - not always perfect judgment, but they are less easily fooled than non-experts. Now disinfo can go straight to the consumer (disintermediation). The Soviets, dedicated to decades of expert propaganda to reach westerners, I bet would have thought it was an impossible fantasy to communicate directly to individuals!
3) Quality: Through corporate mass surveillance, collecting data on individuals, tracking responses in detail, A/B testing, etc., the effectiveness of the disinfo can be greatly improved - just like advertising. (I'd be interested to know how much it can be improved.)
Seems bad, but tbh not terribly sophisticated. I imagine one could do a lot worse in filler content generation using LLMs as well as better obfuscation techniques for the servers.
Or perhaps those who do it better are just undetected.
So Chinese people are running some of the low quality spam content farms that have been plaguing the internet for years, seemingly primarily for financial reasons like the rest of them. The only real difference is their Reuters is linked to China rather than the West.
> their Reuters is linked to China rather than the West.
Reuters is a company in a regulatory and political framework with high degree is freedom of the press and expression, rather than an instrument controlled by a government for the purpose of propaganda.
Reuters is an outlet completely captured by its owners, for whatever purposes that benefit its owners, exactly like whatever this is. UPI is owned by the Moonies. The Falun Gong have multiple OTA television stations in the US that give no indication that they are owned by the Falun Gong.
edit: I forgot that the Epoch Times is also owned by the Falun Gong, an outlet that plays a significant part in US politics. If you are familiar with the Epoch Times, did you know it was owned by the Falun Gong?
Did you know that the Washington Times, another important newspaper, is also Moonie-owned?
Or that the "International Business Times" and Newsweek are likely controlled by the Korean Christian sect The Community?
> Reuters is an outlet completely captured by its owners, for whatever purposes that benefit its owners, exactly like whatever this is
Such a vague statement. You can say that about anything. Who are the owners? What are their interests? How did Reuters serve those interest? Reuters changed ownership in 2008. Did their content also change after?
Everyone who follows Chinese news knows Epoch Times is affiliated with Falun Gong — [0]. China media make sure of that. Was anyone aware of this fake network of China affiliated websites if not for the investigation of citilab?
>Epoch Times is also owned by the Falun Gong, an outlet that plays a significant part in US politics
I was aware that Epoch was owned by Falun Gong, I was unaware they play a significant part in US politics. What does that mean? I honestly never see it referenced anywhere. I have seen them in free giveaway newspaper containers pre-pandemic, but I would not view that as a sign of influence (the opposite really).
Reuters has been linked to covert government influence operations regarding Russia and Syria. Their "trust principles" facade is just that. They are no more reliable than any other serious news outlet, from China, Russia, or America. They publish things that their owners find acceptable.
The article itself says it serves financial interests, and the internet is full of non-Chinese groups doing the same thing primarily for financial reasons.
I find it hard to believe the Chinese state would mix in so many crypto scams, but that makes perfect sense for a private group.
I visited one of those sites, https://sevillatimes.com/ , and absolutely none of the articles posted there talk about the city, not even about the country where the city is in. So nobody would think that website is a local news website.
I doubt if lots of websites all saying "[Chinese scientist who made allegations about Covid] is a complete rumor maker" are crypto spam. The Chinese government seems like a plausible patron.
It's also very likely that both are paying customers. The article doesn't accuse it of being run by the government directly, they specifically refer to it as a private firm.
The strategy would be to post the articles to facebook. Nobody goes to a specific website to see the news anyway. The website just exists to be linked to by facebook and look “legit enough”
I think they are not trying to target Spain but rather some country in Latin America, possibly Colombia. Weird enough, all their news seem to be reposted from a Dominican newspaper but there is no Sevilla there. Maybe they thought it was close enough.
The Internet is an absolute disaster; disinformation campaigns are everywhere, drowning people, with endless horrible consequences. Freedom, peace, prosperity, democracy, human rights, health, etc. are all at risk.
Why are we putting up with it? We really need a solution. At this point, I'd love a walled garden where I know I'd get quality information. It doesn't have to be perfect, but not misinformation or disinformation. I'd love a search engine that restricted itself to quality sources.
Even from a purely immediate self-interest perspective, why are all these intelligent people accepting such a trash product?
Who do you trust to provide that solution who is above using it to control narratives for their own benefit? And do you think they will forever be trustworthy and/or agree with your world view?
It's a theoretical problem, but it's a commonplace practical function. Everything you read was chosen and written by other people. There's no getting around it unless you are doing primary research. I'll have to choose carefully.
For example, if DuckDuckGo offered a 'quality sources' search, I'd pay for it. I don't want to search the entire Internet - that's madness if you think about it. Why are we doing that?
misinformation is "false or inaccurate information"
Isn't this the same as asking for a source of information that is always correct? Has that ever actually existed in any form?
What about lying by omission?
It seems like we're all freaking out about something that has always been true: people lie, say half-truths, distort facts. It's pretty hard to convey only information that is 100% provably true and also tells a complete picture.
> misinformation is "false or inaccurate information" / Isn't this the same as asking for a source of information that is always correct? Has that ever actually existed in any form?
That's really taking that definition (if that's the precise definition) to a theoretical extreme! And then you say your extreme is impossible. Yes, I agree!
What is up with the font rendering on this website? It looks terrible at default zoom (100%), looks fine if I change it to 90% or 110%. Chrome 120.0.6099.200 on Windows 11.
> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
This looks like an amateur hour scam operation. Somebody sets up some sites that look vaguely passable (targeted at an audience who does not even speak the language on the site), auto-populates them with auto-translated Chinese newswire and blog stuff, local scraped stuff, etc. and then claims they're "major foreign media outlets", which they then sell access to for the riveting price of just 1.4 million won - about $1000. It looks like a modern take on something like a 419 scam, except I expect they probably do follow through on publishing whatever people submit!
Granted not as exciting a discovery as a shadowy influence operation with a super sexy nickname, but probably more accurate.
[1] - https://kmong.com/gig/497744