influence

Recently, as the political battle over congressional redistricting brought California into the national spotlight, Facebook users were shown a curious series of ads.

The ads, from a straightforward-looking news site called the California Courier, often felt a lot like campaign commercials, linking to articles hammering Democrats in the state, including Gov. Gavin Newsom. Few punched in the other direction, toward 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 critics say is meant to undermine voter-approved protections and entrench one party rule in California.”

A reader who clicked through to the Courier’s website would find stories that largely align with a conservative view of the news, like a video of a child “riding a scooter through San Fran’s drug-ravaged streets,” or an anonymous piece that cites “confidential sources” cautioning against a “left-wing educator” running for a position with an Orange County school district.

What a reader would not find is any disclosure of the Courier’s ownership or funding, including what appear to be ties to a network of conservative organizations in California that, according to one researcher, scaled up a series of right-leaning news sites in three other states just ahead of the 2024 election.

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

Critics say the California outlet is part of a growing, nationwide ecosystem of innocuous-looking, cheaply produced news publications that publish and advertise biased articles in an attempt to surreptitiously influence elections. They worry the practice could mislead voters and corrode trust in nonpartisan news providers.

“I think we are in an era where people are consuming so much content online without knowing the source of it,” said Max Read, 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 that by disguising what they’re doing online just helps exacerbate that problem of people not trusting what they come across.”

At a glance, the Courier does not necessarily look right-leaning. A handful of stories seem like straight news echoing press releases, such as one announcing new affordable housing units. But even those that seem relatively neutral may have a right-leaning spin, like one describing speeding fines tied to income as a potential “woke penalty loophole.”

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

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 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 formerly in print. “The two publications have nothing in common. Neither politically nor ethnically nor anything like that.”

Although it lacks the pedigree of the Armenian publication, the right-leaning Courier has shown it is well-immersed in today’s social media. A video it made suggesting Newsom flip-flopped in his view of President Biden’s mental acuity generated thousands of reactions.

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

A few, however, 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 short bio.

The Lincoln Media Foundation is tied to the Lincoln Club, a group based in Orange County that bills itself as “the oldest and largest conservative major donor organization in the state of California.” The club funnels anonymously donated money to conservative candidates and causes.

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

One hour later, the Courier’s Facebook page promoted it as well, not mentioning the Lincoln Media Foundation but describing the documentary as “much anticipated.”

Neither the Lincoln Club, Lincoln Media, the California Courier or the Courier writers responded to multiple requests for comment about the origins of the site, either through email phone, or social media messages.

That silence, and the lack of information about ownership on the Courier’s website, come despite the outlet’s chief goal, as outlined on its Facebook page.

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

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

In 2024, Read’s Institute for Strategic Dialogue, which tracks disinformation and extremism online, found a handful of such sites that noted deep in their privacy policies that they were projects from Lincoln Media. Those outlets had names like the Angeleno and the Keystone Courier, and stretched from California to Pennsylvania, although a resulting report didn’t name the Courier.

Many of the sites used Facebook and other social media tools to press a conservative agenda, the report found. Meta has rules against “coordinated inauthentic behavior” but it’s not clear whether Lincoln Media’s websites would cross that line.

‘Pink slime’ news

Researchers have taken to calling sites like those operated by Lincoln Media “pink slime” news, a name coined after a meat-industry additive. These sites don’t produce outright false news, like others, but they do not meet basic journalistic standards. That often means low-quality content and failing to disclose associations with outside organizations.

The sites generally aren’t designed to generate revenue, but to sway public opinion. The majority, according to researchers, lean toward a conservative agenda, and if the site’s stories gain traction on social media, they can travel widely. “If they place an ad well or if they just get the right pickup from the right influencer, these things don’t really have a limit on how far they can go,” Read said.

While it’s not clear how many sites the Lincoln Club might fund, it isn’t the only group that has used the strategy.

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

Ethical or not, the strategy can be effective for lending credibility to a particular viewpoint. Kevin DeLuca, an assistant professor of political science at Yale University who has researched pink slime websites, conducted an experiment that showed subjects 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 examine the sites closely, looking at whether they included information like credible mission pages and other details. But even with the tip sheet, the study subjects said in interviews that they didn’t strongly prefer the truly local over the manufactured sites.

DeLuca says these sites are now in place around the United States, and news consumers have little idea when they’re running into them. The problem may only get worse with the spread of generative AI, since that technology further reduces the cost of creating such sites.

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

While it can’t be said whether any one publication uses AI-generated content, the wide availability of tools like ChatGPT, capable of producing at least a semblance of a passable news story, have also made it easier to build up such sites.

“It’s going to make these pink slime sites even harder for people to know that what they’re reading is not from a human source and not really local investigative journalism.” DeLuca said.

Sassounian, for his part, doesn’t think there’s any risk the two California Couriers would ever be confused with each other. He took over the paper in the 1980s, and his columns, which he describes as “hard-hitting editorials that defend the rights of the Armenian people worldwide,” have been translated into languages around the world.

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

Colin Lecher writes for CalMatters.

Washington, DC – United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio has not been shy about his desire to see the toppling of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.

Infamously, the former Florida senator even posted a series of photos of slain deposed leaders, including a bloodied former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, as tensions with the US and Maduro’s government spiked in 2019.

But it wasn’t until the second administration of US President Donald Trump that Rubio’s vision of a hardline approach to Latin America and his longtime pressure campaign against leftist leaders was realised – culminating on Saturday with the illegal abduction of longtime Venezuelan leader Maduro.

Experts say Rubio has relied on an ability to capitalise on the overlapping interests of competing actors within the Trump administration to achieve this, even as his broader ideological goals, including the ousting of Cuba’s communist government, will likely remain constrained by the administration’s competing ambitions.

“It took a tremendous amount of political skill on his part to marginalise other voices in the administration and elsewhere who were saying: ‘This is not our conflict. This is not what we stand for. This is going to upset our base,’” Alejandro Velasco, an associate professor of history at New York University, told Al Jazeera.

Those agendas included US President Donald Trump’s preoccupation with opening Venezuela’s nationalised oil industry, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s desire for a more pugilistic military approach abroad, and adviser Stephen Miller’s fixation on migration and mass deportation.

“So that’s the way that Rubio was able to bring into line not quite competing, but really divergent agendas, all of them to focus on Venezuela as a way to advance a particular end,” Velasco said.

A hawk in ‘America First’

A traditionalist hawk who has regularly supported US military intervention in the name of spreading Western democracy and human rights abroad, Rubio initially appeared to be an awkward fit to be Trump’s top diplomat in his second term.

His selection followed a campaign season defined by Trump’s vow to end foreign wars, eschew US-backed regime change, and pursue a wider “America First” pivot.

But the actual shape of Trump’s foreign policy has borne little resemblance to that vision, with the administration adopting a so-called “Peace Through Strength” doctrine that observers say has resulted in more room for military adventurism. That has, to date, seen the Trump administration launch bombing campaigns against Yemen and Iran, strike armed groups in Nigeria and Somalia, and attack alleged drug smuggling boats in the Caribbean.

The approach of Trump 2.0 has more closely aligned with Rubio’s vision of Washington’s role abroad, which has long supported maximum-pressure sanctions campaigns and various forms of US intervention to topple governments.

The US secretary of state’s personal ideology traces to his South Florida roots, where his family settled in the 1960s after leaving Cuba three years before the rise of Fidel Castro, in what Velasco described as an “acerbically anti-communist” political environment.

“I think for him, it started as a question of finally making real the hopes and dreams of Cubans in Florida and elsewhere to return to their homeland under a capitalist government,” Velasco explained.

“It went from that to what this could represent, if we think about it more hemispherically – a bigger shift that would not only increase, but in fact ensure, US hegemony in the region for the 21st century.”

‘Vacuum was his to fill’

After tangling with Trump in the 2016 presidential election, in which the future president deridingly dubbed his opponent “Little Marco” while Rubio decried him as a “con man”, the pair forged a pragmatic working relationship.

Rubio eventually endorsed Trump ahead of the 2016 vote, helping to deliver Florida. In Trump’s first term, Rubio came to be seen as the president’s “shadow secretary” on Latin America, an atypical role that saw the lawmaker influence Trump’s eventual recognition of Juan Guaido as interim president in opposition to Maduro.

Analysts note Rubio’s approach to Venezuela has always been directly aimed at undermining the economic support it provides to Cuba, with the end goal of toppling the island’s 67-year-old Communist government. Following Maduro’s abduction on Saturday, Rubio quickly pivoted to the island nation, telling reporters: “If I lived in Havana and I was in the government, I’d be concerned”.

Still, in the early months of Trump’s second term, Rubio appeared largely sidelined, with the president instead favouring close friends and family members to spearhead marquee negotiations on ceasefires in Gaza and Ukraine.

During this time, Rubio was slowly amassing a sizeable portfolio. Beyond serving as secretary of state, Rubio became the acting administrator of the Trump-dismantled US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the acting archivist of the US National Archives. Most notably, he became the acting director of National Security, making him the first top US diplomat to also occupy the impactful White House role since Henry Kissinger.

Rubio eventually found himself in a White House power vacuum, according to Adam Isacson, the director of defence oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA).

“Rubio’s somebody who understands Washington better than the Grenells and Witkoffs of the world,” Isacson told Al Jazeera, referring to Trump’s special envoys Richard Grenell and Steve Witkoff.

“At the same time, other powerful figures inside the White House, like Stephen Miller and [Director of the Office of Management and Budget] Russ Vought haven’t cared as much about foreign policy,” he said, “so the vacuum was his to fill.”

Meanwhile, Rubio showed his ability to be an “ideological weather vane”, pivoting regularly to stay in Trump’s good graces, Isacson said. The National Security Strategy released by the White House in December exemplified that approach.

The document, which is drafted by the National Security adviser with final approval from the president, offered little in tough language towards Russia, despite Rubio’s previous hard lines on the war in Ukraine. It supported the gutting of US foreign aid, despite Rubio’s years-long support for the system. It offered little of the human-rights language with which Rubio had earlier in his career styled himself as a champion.

It did, however, include a “Trump corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, which dovetailed with Rubio’s worldview by calling for the restoration of US “preeminence” over the Western Hemisphere.

A pyrrhic victory?

To be sure, the toppling of Maduro has so far proved a partial, if not pyrrhic victory for Rubio, far short of the comprehensive change he has long supported.

In a news conference immediately following Maduro’s abduction, Trump doused support for exiled opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, who has hewed close to Rubio’s vision for a future Venezuela. Several news agencies have since reported that US intelligence assessed that installing an opposition figure would lead to widespread chaos in the country.

Rubio has so far been the point man in dealing with Maduro’s former deputy and replacement, Delcy Rodriguez, who has been a staunch supporter of the Hugo Chavez-founded Chavismo movement that Rubio has long railed against. Elections remain a far-off prospect, with Trump emphasising working with the government to open the oil industry to the US.

The secretary of state has not been officially given a role connected to the country, but has earned the less-than-sincere title in some US media of “viceroy of Venezuela”.

On news shows, Rubio has been tasked with walking back Trump’s claim that the US would “run” the South American country, while selling the administration’s oft-contradicted message that the abduction of Maduro was a law enforcement action, not regime change, an act of war, or a bid for the country’s oil.

“I think he’s sort of lying through his teeth,” Lee Schlenker, a research associate at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, told Al Jazeera.

“Even he doesn’t seem to believe a lot of the sort of rhetorical and discursive pretexts that have been deployed about drugs, about narco-terrorism, about a law enforcement-only operation, about just sort of enforcing a Department of Justice indictment,” he said.

Having to work with Rodriguez, and reportedly, Venezuela’s security czar and Minister of Interior Diosdado Cabello, has been a “bucket of cold water on Rubio’s broader illusions”, Schlenker added, noting that Rubio’s end goal still remains “the end of the Chavista project”.

Rubio is also likely to face further reality checks when it comes to his expected attempts to pitch the overthrow of what he will likely argue is a weakened Cuba.

The island, without the economic resources of Venezuela and no known drug trade, is seen as far less appealing to Trump and many of his allies.

“Compared to Venezuela,” Schlenker said, “there are a lot more reasons why Trump would have less interest in going after Cuba.”