The number of fake local news sites in the United States now exceeds that of authentic local media, research group NewsGuard said in a report Tuesday, warning of a potential explosion of disinformation five months before the US presidential election. .
• Read also: Media crisis: “The press suffers from a love deficit”, according to an expert
Hundreds of sites posing as real local media outlets, often using partisan articles generated by artificial intelligence, have emerged in recent months, according to the report, which identifies 1,265 in all.
For comparison, Northwestern University counted 1,213 local newspaper websites in the United States last year.
“You now have a greater than 50 percent chance when you see a website claiming to cover local news that it is fake,” the Newsguard report points out.
Nearly half of these partisan sites targeted key states that could swing the November presidential election in favor of Joe Biden or Donald Trump, according to online media Axios.
Among these fake media, Newsguard identifies a network of 167 Russian disinformation sites linked according to the organization to John Mark Dougan, a former Florida police officer who fled the United States for Moscow.
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 deserts”.
Newspapers continue to disappear at a rate of more than two per week in the United States, according to the study, while the country has lost nearly two-thirds of its print journalists since 2005.
“With traditional newspapers disappearing, fake sites are rushing to fill the void,” Newsguard wrote in its report.
“As a result, millions of Americans are left without authentic local information,” the organization adds.
These fake partisan propaganda sites previously relied on a legion of authors, but the advent of generative artificial intelligence means that it is now much cheaper and much quicker to create fake content that is difficult to distinguish from TRUE.
