If you are a close observer of The New York Times, as Alison Harvey is, you might have noticed a headline about Megyn Kelly, the Fox News anchor. It suggested that she had died, at age 45, leaving us without “America’s favorite news reporter.”

This wasn’t a news story written by a Times reporter. And it isn’t true: Kelly is alive and prosperous, exceptionally so. But it has appeared, with some regularity, on the Times website, as an advertisement pretending to be a news story.

In other words, it’s fake news, or at least a version of it.

Harvey, a Times reader from Reno, Nev., has been noticing the ad awhile now, and wrote me this week to complain. “This ad, or ‘clickbait,’ keeps popping up on various New York Times pages online,” she said. “This is unacceptable. Please stop these ads, which frankly make me feel like the NY Times is no better an outlet than the horrifying Facebook feeds with all of their fake news clickbait items.”

How could such fraudulent content wind up on the Times website? Through something called programmatic advertising, which essentially means that computers and algorithms conduct the transactions between advertisers and publishers rather than people. It’s machine to machine, like a stock market matching buyers with sellers.