[HN Gopher] Paperwall: Chinese websites posing as local news out...
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Paperwall: Chinese websites posing as local news outlets target
global audiences
Author : kieto
Score : 218 points
Date : 2024-02-07 13:22 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (citizenlab.ca)
(TXT) w3m dump (citizenlab.ca)
| vdaea wrote:
| 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.
|
| Also this article offers little to no proof that the Chinese
| government is behind these sites. They look more like a network
| of crypto spam. https://sevillatimes.com/category/presionesoltar/
| Maken wrote:
| 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.
| dash2 wrote:
| 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.
| gs17 wrote:
| 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.
| dmonitor wrote:
| 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"
| feverzsj wrote:
| It never worked. People behind these just want to make some quick
| money from the supreme leader and buy mansions/yachts in rotten
| capitalism countries.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN. It's not what
| this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| sva_ wrote:
| 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.
| CrazyStat wrote:
| 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.
|
| Screenshot at 100% zoom: https://i.imgur.com/X7bN7hT.png
| lolinder wrote:
| > 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.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| CrazyStat wrote:
| It's an earnest question, not a complaint. I looked at and
| messed around with the CSS a bit but I'm not a web dev so I
| don't know what the problem is.
| aembleton wrote:
| Looks OK for me. Its loading the font from
| https://citizenlab.ca/wp-content/themes/citizenlab-wp-theme/...
|
| Can you access that URL or is it being blocked for you?
| CrazyStat wrote:
| Not blocked, I'm able to access it fine.
| netsharc wrote:
| 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. ;)
|
| [1] The map from https://www.pmel.noaa.gov/news-story/new-study-
| shows-some-co..., but the original caption was under the map and
| not superimposed on the map, and was cropped by the fake-news
| peddler.
| drewg123 wrote:
| 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..
| kieto wrote:
| Submitter here, this is exactly what happened, I hit the
| length limit with the non-editorialized title, so I tried to
| reduce it the best I could :)
| mistrial9 wrote:
| 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..
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| 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.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > 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.
| pessimizer wrote:
| 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_?
| pphysch wrote:
| 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.
| stratigos wrote:
| China makes war through deception and gaslighting, not through
| tanks and bombs. They declared war on the entire world more than
| two decades ago.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't take HN threads into nationalistic flamewar,
| regardless of which nation. It's not what this site is for, and
| destroys what it is for.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| mschuster91 wrote:
| 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].
|
| [1] https://money.cnn.com/interactive/media/the-macedonia-story/
|
| [2] https://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/netzpolitik/russische-
| trollf...
| ryandrake wrote:
| 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.
| lostlogin wrote:
| As an aside 'You-Know-Who' is an immediate Harry Potter
| reference for me.
| ryandrake wrote:
| 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.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| 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).
| xbmcuser wrote:
| This is the time of information warfare I guess they learned
| something from India "Pro-Indian 'fake websites targeted decision
| makers in Europe'" https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-
| india-50749764
| reaperducer wrote:
| 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.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| 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.
| scarecrowbob wrote:
| Well, one for each side that can field a media
| organization. :D
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| 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.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > 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?
| reactordev wrote:
| Not to mention the Sinclair Broadcast Group. Doing the same
| thing with Radio and local TV.
| somenameforme wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] - https://kmong.com/gig/497744
| imiric wrote:
| 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".
| somenameforme wrote:
| What do you think Chinese news and blogs are full of?
| imiric wrote:
| 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.
| somenameforme wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] - https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-
| studies/kmong/
| imiric wrote:
| 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.
| somenameforme wrote:
| The same way I'd explain all the other stuff. It's just
| lots of filler to try to make the site look, from the
| scammer's perspective, legit. And you have to keep in
| mind this issue of perspectives. What you see as
| propaganda, is what somebody else would just see as the
| equivalent as a stream from e.g. Reuters. And the scammer
| is probably Chinese or Korean. Since the target victims
| are Korean, he probably wouldn't want to use e.g. Korean
| news sources that might be more readily recognizable.
|
| If you want to see this as some sort of a state influence
| operation, you run into a million issues. The sites are
| poorly done (template boilerplate is even left up in many
| places!) and no native would likely consider them "real",
| there has been exactly 0 effort to advertise or share the
| sites, the sites seem to be regularly taken down which
| ruins ranking/viral possibilities, what "propaganda" that
| does exist on the sites has to be actively searched for,
| the sites seemingly allow anybody to publish on them, the
| sites are loaded with stuff that's going to push people
| away like shady crypto spam (and I say that as a huge fan
| of crypto!), so forth and so on.
|
| Especially for things like this, I think Occam's Razor is
| quite sharp.
| imiric wrote:
| > It's just lots of filler to try to make the site look,
| from the scammer's perspective, legit.
|
| And they just happen to have mostly political propaganda
| from CGTN, a CCP mouthpiece? If the intent was only to
| scam, there are thousands of ways of doing that with
| better results, without involving propaganda.
|
| > What you see as propaganda, is what somebody else would
| just see as the equivalent as a stream from e.g. Reuters.
|
| C'mon. If you search for "china" on any of these sites
| you'll only see pro-China narratives, promoting the One
| China policy, etc. Western media has its own agenda,
| sure, but this type of blatant propaganda is only found
| on fringe publications.
|
| > If you want to see this as some sort of a state
| influence operation, you run into a million issues.
|
| State run psyops don't need to be sophisticated. Their
| only goal is to flood the web with their narratives, and
| lower the signal to noise ratio, so that when people
| search for specific topics, theirs will hopefully come
| up. For every attempt that does this right, there are
| millions more that do a half-assed job at it.
|
| > Especially for things like this, I think Occam's Razor
| is quite sharp.
|
| Precisely. The CCP runs a well-oiled machine built to
| pump out disinformation via every public channel
| available. It takes them no effort to create sites like
| these, and all steps of the process are likely fully
| automated. I find the simplest explanation to be that
| this is just another variant of this, rather than a scam
| operation that builds dozens of sites with pages upon
| pages of content just to get people to click on some
| links, or whatever type of scam this might be. If it
| quacks like a duck...
|
| I don't think we'll know for sure either way, or convince
| each other, but cheers for the discussion.
| dang wrote:
| Please make your substantive points without swipes, as the
| site guidelines ask:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html.
|
| This is particularly important when the topic is divisive.
| That's in the guidelines too btw.
| imiric wrote:
| Noted. I toned it down a bit.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| > 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).
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| whoswho wrote:
| Is there a Chinese equivalent of HN (niche tech forum, not the Y
| combinator front)? How do we get access?
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| Putin's folks have been doing this for decades; I'm surprised
| China waited for so long.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| 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?
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| 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?
| wolverine876 wrote:
| 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?
| Dig1t wrote:
| 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.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > 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!
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