Related entities CSV

[zpoch]

Perhaps we need some sort of related entities CSV to track companies and other organizations involved.

I've identified several already with some sort of relation to this, and just now came across image links in the source code on some of these sites that point to https://jnswire.s3.amazonaws.com/jns-media URLs. I did a quick search of jns media and didn't find much, but when I searched for jnswire, I came up with a few things.

A Twitter page named Journatic News Wire started in... wait for it... 2012. https://twitter.com/jnswire

Another quick search of Journatic because it sounded familiar in relation to all of this so far came up with this a bunch of articles from 2012 related to Journatic publishing fake bylines...

• https://www.thisamericanlife.org/extras/updates-about-journatic
• https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jul/06/adventures-journatic-new-media-outsourced-hyperlocal-news
• https://archives.cjr.org/behind_the_news/media_start-up_journatic_buste.php
• https://www.npr.org/2012/07/06/156311078/fake-bylines-reveal-true-costs-of-local-news
• https://www.pbs.org/video/chicago-tonight-july-31-2012-journatics-fall-from-grace/

Something that stood out to me in my Facebook investigating yesterday was that many of these pages though the Facebook Page Transparency feature show that someone is managing the page from the Philippines. This quote from the NPR article stands out due to the fact that they said they were doing the fake bylines with people from the Philippines...

"I don't know those communities, and I have no stake in them. And so it didn't matter to me that I found out all the information and I got it right," Smith said. "There is just something inauthentic about the whole process. And the picking of fake names for these writers in the Philippines is just a symptom of that."

It looks like Journatic has become Locality Labs (LocalLabs is running some SSL certs as per #19 ) through Brian Timpone as he is marked as CEO on their LinkedIn page.

The Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School has done a fair amount of investigative legwork on this identifying 450 sites, 12 state networks, and 5 separate corporate entities involved in the scheme in Dec. of 2019. https://www.cjr.org/tow_center_reports/hundreds-of-pink-slime-local-news-outlets-are-distributing-algorithmic-stories-conservative-talking-points.php

Of the 450 sites we discovered, at least 189 were set up as local news networks across ten states within the last twelve months by an organization called Metric Media.

That number seems to have grown exponentially in the last few months, as Metric Media's president's bio says they have over 1,100 sites. https://www.situationmanagementgroup.com/brad-bio

President of Metric Media LLC, a national media company that operates more than 1,100 community-based news sites.

[mentor20]

We have over 1024 domains listed in sites.csv now.

This should also go in the related entities CSV: franklinarcher.com/our_publications

We started such a sort of related entities CSV here: https://github.com/MassMove/AttackVectors/blob/master/LocalJournals/sites-references.csv