In 2019, a Michigan reporter uncovered a network of websites purporting to be local news sites. All of the sites had been set up at the same time, and they all looked like “normal” newspapers with familiar-sounding names: the Lansing Sun, the Ann Arbor Times, the Detroit City Wire. Each contained the same kinds of partisan stories—on how Michiganders support President Trump, for example—mixed in with stories about where to buy the least expensive gasoline. They had been designed, deliberately, to be pumped into hypercharged, conspiratorial, partisan echo chambers.
