According to a news report, the European Union is stepping up its effort to prevent disinformation from spreading in collaboration with fact-checking organization in its member countries. They fear that foreign actors such as the Russian government to influence the EU parliament election later this month by spreading eurosceptic or anti-immigrant content.
Since 2017, I also have been developing a new methodology to detect sources of false news on the internet using a commercial web search API and quantitative text analysis. There were several technological problems that I need to solve, but I finally produced a result that I will present at the EPSA Annual Conference 2019, Belfast. The title of my paper is Searching for ‘submarine’ propaganda outlets: an efficient method to identify sources of false information on the web. I wrote the paper to show that we can find false news sites using these tools at low costs, but also found many websites that disguise themselves as news media in Europe.
For example, many of the websites in the table refers to European cities and countries in their names to make their news articles more trustworthy. Interestingly, all of the websites are hosted in a web server with the IP address 195.154.220.115. I could not find out who is behind these false European news sites, but I think these websites could be used for propaganda against European to influence political events like the EU parliament election.
| Name | Domain | Place |
|---|---|---|
| Germany Latest News | germanylatest.com | Germany |
| France News 7 | francenews7.com | France |
| Fox News Online 24 | foxnews24.info | – |
| Florida Report Daily | floridareportdaily.com | Florida |
| Extra London News | extralondon.co.uk | London |
| Extra American News | extraamerican.com | America |
| Evening Washington News | eveningwashington.com | Washington |
| Europe Brief News | europebriefnews.com | Europe |
| Edition Online | editiononline.co.uk | – |
| Edition America | editionamerica.com | America |
| The Daily Cambridge | dailycambridge.co.uk | Cambridge |
| Current Affairs Online | currentaffairsonline.co.uk | – |
| California Today | californiatoday.net | California |
| Brussels Morning | brusselsmorning.com | Brussels |
| Britain Today News | britaintodaynews.com | Britain |
| Britain Post News | britainpost.co.uk | Britain |
| Business News Report | bnreport.com | – |
| Berlin Tomorrow | berlintomorrow.com | Berlin |
| Australia News Today | australianews.today | Australia |
| Amsterdam Times | amsterdamtimes.info | Amsterdam |
You can list the website hosted on the web server using reverse IP lookup tool.
