News Brief
Disinformation

Surge in Fake News Now Being Spread by Mirror Sites Imitating the Guardian, al-Jazeera and the Atlantic

A collection of fake news websites imitating al-Jazeera, the Atlantic, the Belgian newspaper Le Soir and others have recently cropped up online, according to the Guardian (also included in the list of fake sites.) The “doppelganger” websites have domain names extremely similar to the news organizations they imitate however the fake articles are pushed out over social media and other websites that are often Russian, the Guardian writes.

One story published in a fake Le Soir in February said that Saudi Arabia was funding Emmanuel Macron’s presidential campaign and another in “the Guardian” this week quoted Sir John Scarlett, a former head of MI6, as “falsely claiming that the Rose Revolution in Georgia in 2003 was instigated by British and US intelligence agencies to destabilise Russia.”

Read the full article at the (real) Guardian.