Could this mysterious website influence the 2026 election?

from Colin LetcherCalMatters

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

Earlier this year, as the political battle over congressional redistricting thrust California into the national spotlight, Facebook users were shown a curious series of ads.

The ads, which came from a clean news site called the California Courier, often looked like campaign ads, linking to articles bashing state Democrats, including Gov. Gavin Newsom. A few went the other way, to the Republicans. One said, “California Democrats just rewrote their gerrymandering plan so voters will see their partisan map on the ballot this November.” Another called Proposition 50, which passed in November“a scheme that critics say is intended to undermine voter-approved protections and strengthen one-party rule in California.”

A reader who clicks over to the Courier’s website will find stories that largely align with a conservative view of the news, such as video clip of a kid “riding a scooter through the drug-ravaged streets of San Fran,” or anonymous piece which cited “confidential sources” warning against a “left-wing educator” running for a position in an Orange County school district.

What the reader won’t find is any disclosure of the Courier’s ownership or funding, including what appears to be a network of conservative organizations in California that one researcher says expanded a string of right-wing news sites to three other states just before the 2024 election.

The courier has money to spend. According to a review of the ad library maintained by Facebook owner Meta, the store has spent more than $80,000 since 2021 to promote its stories on social issues and politics, potentially reaching tens of thousands of users on the platform each week.

Critics say the California publisher is part of a growing, nationwide ecosystem of innocuous-looking, cheaply produced news publications that publish and promote biased stories in an effort to covertly influence elections. They worry the practice could mislead voters and undermine trust in nonpartisan news providers.

“I think we’re in an age where people are consuming so much content online without knowing its source,” said Max Reid, who has studied the network apparently behind the Courier at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a nonprofit that works to counter political polarization. “And for well-funded organizations to contribute to this by hiding what they do online only helps to exacerbate this problem of people not trusting what they come across.”

At first glance, the Courier doesn’t necessarily look right. A few stories appear to be pure news, reflecting press releases, such as one advertises new affordable housing. But even those that appear to be relatively neutral may have a right-hand spin, such as one describing speeding fines income-linked as a potential ‘punishment loophole’.

The publication also shares a name with a 67-year-old California-based publication serving the Armenian diaspora. One of that Courier’s founders won recognition from peers for his tenure as dean from the University of Maryland School of Journalism.

When The Markup and CalMatters contacted the publisher of the Armenian Courier, he said he was unaware of the other site. He told a reporter that he was opening it for the first time.

“I’m definitely not conservative,” said Harut Sassounian, who owns the Courier, where his regular editorials appear online and previously in print. “The two editions have nothing in common. Neither political nor ethnic nor anything like that.”

The Lincoln Media Network

While it doesn’t have the pedigree of its Armenian twin, the right-leaning Courier has shown itself to be well-versed in today’s social media. A video you made suggesting that Newsom had failed in his opinion of President Joe Biden’s mental acuity drew thousands of reactions.

The publication also shares some of the murky citation practices in modern social media. Almost all of the stories on the site are unattributed or simply attributed to the California Courier.

However, some include author names. One of the named writers describes himself on social media as a “content creator” for the Lincoln Media Foundation, a conservative group, and links to Courier articles. Another shares a name with a Republican strategist based in Orange County, and a third lists a resume with conservative organizations in a brief bio.

Lincoln Media Foundation is affiliated with the Lincoln Club, an Orange County-based group that bills itself as “the oldest and largest conservative grassroots donor organization in the state of California.” The club directs anonymously donated money to conservative candidates and causes.

Lincoln Media Foundation Facebook page recently said it was “proud to present” a new documentary that claims to reveal “the untold truth about the Pacific Palisades Fire,” the natural disaster that tore through the state this year and increased political pressure on Newsom.

An hour later, The Courier’s Facebook page also promoted it without mentioning the Lincoln Media Foundation, but described the documentary as “highly anticipated.”

Neither the Lincoln Club, Lincoln Media, California Courier or the Courier’s authors responded to multiple requests for comment about the site’s origins, either by email, phone or social media messages.

This silence and lack of ownership information on Courier’s website comes despite the store’s primary purpose as outlined on its Facebook page.

“California Courier offers state and local news,” reads the page’s description. “Our mission is transparency.”

The Lincoln Club has previously been linked to “local” websites around the country, spreading stories with a decidedly conservative bent.

Last year, the Read Institute for Strategic Dialogue, which tracks disinformation and extremism online, found a handful of such sites which noted deep in their privacy policies that they were Lincoln Media projects. These stores had names such as The Angeleno and Keystone Courier and stretched from California to Pennsylvania, although the subsequent report did not name the Courier.

Many of the sites used Facebook and other social media tools to push a conservative agenda, the report found. Meta has rules against “coordinated inauthentic behavior,” but it’s unclear whether Lincoln Media’s websites will cross that line.

News about “pink slime”.

Researchers have begun calling sites like those run by Lincoln Media “pink slime” news, fictitious name after addition for the meat industry. These sites don’t produce outright fake news like others, but they don’t meet basic journalistic standards. This often means low-quality content and not disclosing links to outside organizations.

Sites are usually not designed to generate revenue, but to influence public opinion. The majority, the researchers say, lean toward a conservative agenda, and if the site’s stories gain traction on social media, they can travel widely. “If they run an ad well or just get the right response from the right influencer, there’s really no limit to how far these things can go,” Reid said.

While it’s unclear how many sites the Lincoln Club can fund, it’s not the only group that has used the strategy.

in 2020 reports the New York Times at Metric Media, a group that created nearly 1,300 sites across the country with names like the Maine Business Daily and the Ann Arbor Times. At first glance, this could pass for simple local news operations. But the Times report found that they took money from public relations firms and Republican operatives to create stories beneficial to those groups, a massive journalistic red flag.

Ethical or not, the strategy can be effective in giving credibility to a particular point of view. Kevin DeLuca, an assistant professor of political science at Yale University who has researched pink slime websites, conducted an experiment that showed participants both real unbiased news sites and others produced by Metric Media.

Some subjects in the study were given a tip sheet that asked them to scrutinize the sites, checking to see if they included information such as credible mission pages and other details. But even with the tip sheet, study participants said in interviews that they didn’t really prefer local over manufactured sites.

DeLuca says these sites are already in the United States, and news users have no idea when they come across them. The problem can only get worse with the spread of generative AI, as this technology further reduces the cost of creating such sites.

Researchers studying these sites say it’s never been easier to produce them. Local news, for example, has faced a years-long financial crisis that has wiped many once-strong operations off the map.

While there’s no telling whether any publication uses AI-generated content, the wide availability of tools like ChatGPT capable of producing at least the semblance of an acceptable news story has also made it easier to build such sites.

“This will make these pink slime sites even more difficult for people to understand that what they are reading is not from a human source and is not truly local investigative journalism.” Deluca said.

Sassounian, for his part, doesn’t think there’s any risk the two California couriers will ever be confused with one another. He took over the paper in the 1980s, and his columns, which he describes as “hard-hitting editorials defending the rights of the Armenian people around the world,” have been translated into languages ​​around the world.

“It’s not nice to have our name used by someone else,” Sassounian said. “I’d rather they didn’t, but I don’t know what I can do about it.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.