Story by: Hannah McClellan
Graphic by: Angie Shen
A fake news page was removed from Facebook in February for posting false and inflammatory information — but not before attracting more than 50,000 followers.
The page, North Carolina Breaking News, featured unattributed local content, often wrong or plagiarized from other outlets. The page also included politically conservative posts containing racist language.
Unfortunately, this type of fake news page is not an anomaly. While their content is less inflammatory than that of North Carolina Breaking News, dozens of other partisan websites set up to appear as local news networks target North Carolinians.
The sites, with names such as “Chapel Hill Review,” “Durham Reporter” and “Hickory Sun” are part of a network named Metric Media, a company that mimics local news organizations and says it exists to “fill the growing news void in local and community news after years of steady disinvestment in local reporting by legacy media.” Metric Media is not associated with North Carolina Breaking News.
UNC-Chapel Hill Associate Professor Ryan Thornburg said these sites are especially dangerous because they mimic underfunded and often scarce local news sites.
“Obviously fake news is bad, mostly because it causes people to distrust everything. When you combine that with local news, it’s doubly dangerous,” Thornburg said. “It’s really hard to fake The New York Times because everyone knows what The New York Times looks like, and they would bring the hammer down on anyone trying to fake their site. But these local sites, they don’t really have the ability to fight back if somebody is mimicking their site. And in a lot of communities, there isn’t even anything there.”
Headed by conservative political consultant Bradley Cameron, many of the Metric Media sites are infrequently updated, featuring aggregated stories from sources such as data releases from federal programs, with very few human bylines. It’s unclear how effective these sites are at attracting readers, but their existence is concerning to people who care about the trustworthiness of news, especially local news.
‘Breeding ground for stuff like this to emerge’
In October 2019, the Lansing State Journal first reported on Metric Media’s network and political connections. Priyanjana Bengani, a senior research fellow at Columbia Journalism School’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, investigated the network because of a quote in the original article: “Metric Media plans to eventually launch thousands of such sites nationwide, the page says.”
Many of the pieces are straight to the point, sharing the cheapest gas prices by zip code and purchasing power of a dollar by state. Among these are articles that hint at bias and sloppy reporting. One piece quotes a human relations commissioner’s opinions about minimum wage raises as fact and uses it as the basis of an entire story. Another’s headline reads, “About 30 cases of North Carolina voter fraud documented by Heritage Foundation,” but fails to mention this count starts in 2000 until the body of the story.
Bengani wanted to see how many pages actually existed.
In her December 2019 report, Bengani found at least 450 of these national partisan outlets masquerading as local news organizations across many networks of sites. This includes 49 Metric Media sites in North Carolina.
Each of the Metric Media sites have Facebook icons on their homepage next to a “Join our newsletter” button. When you click on the link to Facebook, the majority of pages have zero total likes or engagement on shared articles.
On their sites, there are no ads or subscription offers. Many articles are weeks old; others are press releases for various organizations. Though these sites don’t circulate hoaxes or hateful language like the North Carolina Breaking News page, the partisan bent of coverage could confuse readers by not making clear what is opinion and what is fact. Especially when the ownership and funding behind the sites is not disclosed anywhere.
Bengani said taking the threat of these sites seriously is important.
“There is a crisis in local news. You see local news websites running on low resources, cutting back on journalism and all of that,” she said. “That creates a breeding ground for stuff like this to emerge. And here’s the thing — this isn’t the only network.”
‘A particularly big threat’
Sites such as Metric Media that mimic local news organizations are using similar techniques as Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA) used in the 2016 election, Thornburg said. Some of the Twitter handles verified by the U.S. House Intelligence Agency found variants of local news organization sharing disinformation.
Thornburg said the purpose behind some fake news sites is for the “LOL’s” and to run advertising to make money. With many partisan disinformation sites, the purpose is to interfere in elections: from domestic or international sources.
“We already saw this in 2016, and I suspect we’re going to see more of it in 2020,” Thornburg said. “I think they can be a particularly big threat. Especially if people believe in them and keep sharing the news.”
Most of these sites don’t change anyone’s mind because that’s not their intention, UNC-CH Associate Professor Deen Freelon said. Most sites instead try to push people further in the ideology they already have.
Freelon’s research on disinformation as political communication focuses on the presence of Russia’s IRA on Twitter. He avoids using the term “fake news,” due to many people using the phrase to represent different things based on their view of news. Instead, he opts for the more precise term, “disinformation.”
When dealing with disinformation, Freelon recommends familiarizing yourself with a platform’s terms of services to see how you could potentially report a page or post. And if you know the person sharing false information, Freelon said you should contact them and back up your doubts about the authenticity of the shared news.
Jonathan Jones, Durham attorney and UNC-CH media law professor, messaged the North Carolina Breaking News page to call out the fake news they were sharing. The page responded telling him to “f*** off.” While the page was eventually taken down, Jones said the page represents a dangerous fake news trend.
“I think it’s really dangerous in that, one, a lot of people have difficulty distinguishing — and I feel like I’m a content consumer with a high degree of media literacy and I didn’t recognize that first post as being fake right away,” Jones said. He said the most dangerous thing about these pages is that the hateful and racist rhetoric helps normalize those ideas for people who already have them.
“Anybody can get duped here, but a lot of people are having trouble distinguishing,” he said.
Metric Media is just one of several organizations and networks creating these sites across the country. The content is not always as blatantly ideological as that produced by pages like North Carolina Breaking News, but news articles with hidden partisan slants can make electoral misinformation difficult to detect.
“The prevalence of these impostors is likely to increase as the 2020 election approaches,” Brendan Nyhan of The New York Times wrote in a piece regarding such sites in October 2019. “…threatening to mislead more voters and to promote greater skepticism toward all news media, including the local outlets that so many Americans rely on and trust.”
Based on the Facebook pages of the Metric Media sites it is unclear how many people, if any, regularly read or interact with these pages.
“It doesn’t tell the whole picture,” Bengani said regarding current research on the “real world” impact of these sites. “On social there’s no engagement — if there’s no engagement on social, then where is the engagement? Why are they putting in so much effort into something like this? What’s the bigger story?”
