Pink Slime Time: Election Year Launches of Secretly Partisan Local News
PLUS: Nike’s “pro-Israel” sneakers, and a new kind of AI content farm
Welcome to NewsGuard's Reality Check, a report on how misinformation online is undermining trust — and who’s behind it.
Today:
Slime time: More secretly partisan pink slime news sites launched as election looms
Don’t just do it: False accusations against Nike sparked by pro-Israel sneaker
AI content farms spread like weeds
And more…
Today’s newsletter was edited by Jack Brewster and Eric Effron.
1. Pink Slime Networks Expand Ahead of U.S. Elections
By Jack Brewster and McKenzie Sadeghi
Just what our media ecosystem needs: more deception.
What Happened: With the 2024 U.S. presidential election just seven months away, so-called “pink slime” websites are expanding their reach.
Pink slime websites are sites that present themselves as independent local news outlets but are instead funded by partisan groups, which is not disclosed.
The nickname is a reference to the meat-based filler that was supposedly added without a label to ground beef products.
A closer look: Two prominent liberal pink slime networks — States Newsroom and Courier Newsroom — recently launched new sites, with ambitions to expand further. They took names to sound like long-established publishers, such as Utah News Dispatch and The Nevadan.
States Newsroom, a network of nonprofit local news websites that are not transparent about their owner’s ties to liberal groups and causes, recently launched new affiliates in Utah and North Dakota, now publishing state-wide sites in 42 states.
Courier Newsroom, a network of local sites founded by former Democratic operative Tara McGowan and funded by Democratic partisans, launched new sites in Nevada and New Hampshire, as well as a national news site. They are also preparing to launch a site in Texas.
By the numbers: In total, NewsGuard has identified 1,162 pink slime sites operating across the country. That’s almost as much as the approximately 1,200 real news sites operated by real daily local newspapers.
Why should you care? Pink slime sites are used by groups on the left and the right to influence voters with one-sided news coverage, undermining the overall trust in news. They prey on people living in news deserts — where local newspapers have gone out of business — falsely positioning themselves as trustworthy outlets in communities starved for news and, where independent newspapers still exist, often siphon off much-needed advertising revenue because the programmatic advertising machine (ads placed by algorithms) doesn’t distinguish between pink slime “news” operations and the remaining real, independent news publishers.
Learn more about "The Death of Truth."
2. Star of Fabrication: Debunking the Viral Boycott Over Nike’s Alleged Pro-Israel Sneakers
Forget “just do it.” Nike’s new motto could be, “Just don’t misconstrue it.”
The false claim: Social media users are calling for a boycott of Nike after an online video emerged showing a pair of white Nike Air Force 1 shoes emblazoned with a blue Star of David and two blue stripes resembling the Israeli flag. (NewsGuard encountered the false claim in a fact-check by Agence France-Presse.)
False claims that Nike created the shoes as a show of solidarity with Israel in its war against Hamas spread on X and TikTok in English, German, Hindi, and Indonesian, garnering more than 2.13 million views.
A closer look: “@Nike wants to go broke! Keep BOYCOTTING child killers! #BoycottNike,” stated a March 4 X post by Anastasia Maria Loupis, a Danish physician who frequently spreads misinformation about the war.
Watch the video by clicking below:
Similarly, pro-Palestine TikTok user @abdulfalasteen said in a March 4 video: “Nike have sent customised shoes for an Israeli settler who is actually supporting the killing of innocent children, women, and men. Nike is going to the next level of boycott.”
Too little, too late: While Falasteen soon deleted the video and apologized, his original video had already been reposted by numerous accounts, collectively accumulating nearly 10,000 views as of March 13, 2024.
What really happened: The customized shoes are not a Nike design and are not available for sale: A NewsGuard review of Nike’s U.S. and Israel websites did not show any products with Israeli symbols. (Nike did not respond to NewsGuard’s email seeking comment.)
Instead, the shoes were designed by a creator of custom sneakers known as PNT by Ray, who said in a disclaimer on social media accounts that no brand is affiliated with the artwork. “I am not affiliated with any brands represented in this picture, nor is my artwork authorized by these brands to be sold on their products,” the disclaimer states.
PNT by Ray also posted a photo of the shoes on a now-private Instagram account on March 3, 2024, stating. “Custom 🇮🇱 kicks for @mrmichaeldickson [Michael Dickson] for the StandWithUs conference in LA 🔥” Dickson, for whom PNT by Ray made the shoes, is executive director of StandWithUs, according to the organization’s About page. StandWithUs is an international nonprofit organization that “supports Israel and fights antisemitism.”
Actually: Nike has not taken a public stand on the Israel-Hamas war. In a companywide email sent after the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas, Nike CEO John Donahoe condemned "horrific attacks in Israel, tragic loss of innocent Israeli and Palestinian lives," Bloomberg reported.
Do you work in Trust and Safety for a technology company, in brand safety for advertising or otherwise counter misinformation as part of your job? Find out about NewsGuard’s weekly Risk Briefings, a more detailed briefing for professionals. Click here.
3. And one more thing: AI Content Farm Goes Global
By Natalie Huet and Chine Labbé
NewsGuard has previously identified AI content farms using AI to mimic local news sites, to rake in programmatic ad dollars, and even to rewrite satirical articles as “news” to spread misinformation about a war. Now, we’re highlighting a site that appears to be using AI to plagiarize through translation.
What happened: The French-language site “L'Observatoire de l'Europe” (“Europe’s Observatory”) appears to have programmed an AI language model to automatically translate and then republish articles from Euronews.com, the website of an international TV channel.
The website is hosting dozens of word-for-word translations of op-eds published on Euronews.com.
The ObservatoireDeLEurope.com website automatically translates the articles into French, removing any mention of Euronews in the process. The articles typically carry a byline of a “Jean Delaunay.” NewsGuard was unable to find any record that this person exists, and Delaunay's photo appears to be AI-generated according to AI detection tool Hive.
Like other AI content farms, L’Observatoire de l’Europe runs programmatic ads, which typically are placed without regard to the quality of the news site. This means that the site is generating revenue from content that was stolen from another news outlet — and brands are unknowingly funding this apparent plagiarism.
This is a problem that NewsGuard first spotted in August 2023, when we identified 37 other websites using AI chatbots to rewrite news articles that first appeared in news outlets including CNN, The New York Times, and Reuters, with no credit to their original source.
A closer look: Euronews is aware of the problem, even as ObservatoireDeLEurope.com continues to pump out copied articles.
Back on Nov. 30, 2023, Euronews called out L’Observatoire de L’Europe for stealing its content, writing that the site “fails to respect our bylines, and puts all our articles under the name Jean Delaunay — an AI generated fake journalist.”
Euronews added: “They will probably steal this article, and the feedback loop will continue.”
Sure enough, they did: Later that day, L’Observatoire de L’Europe plagiarized the very Euronews.com article that called out L’Observatoire de L’Europe for plagiarizing. Unfortunately, AI failed to capture the irony.
Disclosure: Natalie Huet is a former Euronews journalist. She last worked as a deputy editor for the site’s future-focused section, Euronews Next, from March 2022 to June 2023, when she joined NewsGuard.
Click here to find out more about NewsGuard Trust Scores and our process for rating websites. You can download NewsGuard’s browser extension, which displays NewsGuard Trust Score icons next to links on search engines, social media feeds, and other platforms by clicking here.
Produced by co-CEOs Steven Brill and Gordon Crovitz, and the NewsGuard team.
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