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Last November, the Chicago Morning Star had a scoop.

The online news outlet covering community events in Illinois from public library lectures to themed minor hockey games ran with it: Corruption at the highest level of the Ukrainian state space agency.

The headline read: Space Scandal. The Contract with the American Company FireFly Led to the Dismissal of the Head of the Ukrainian Space Agency.

Within days it was news in Nova Scotia, too.

Ukrainian Corruption and the Canso Spaceport, read the Morning File post by Halifax Examiner founder and investigative journalist Tim Bousquet.

“Because the political stakes are high and there is so much misinformation, I’m always a little leery of any reporting on Ukraine,” cautioned Bousquet, before quoting the Chicago Morning Star story at length.

He tied the story to the Maritime Launch Services proposal to build a spaceport near Canso as an example of corruption behind the project.

Bousquet was right to be leery, although arguably he wasn’t leery enough.

Because the Chicago Morning Star isn’t what it claims to be.

Real news vs. really looks like news

“Chicago Morning Star has been keeping up with its recent history and provides readers with the most up-to-date and unbiased information about life in Chicago, Illinois, the USA and the world,” reads the site’s 'about us' section.

“We don’t just submit information about the events that have occurred, but also learn their prerequisites, monitor the development of the situation and analyze possible consequences. Our authors are among the first to receive the latest information from the world of politics, economics, high technology, social initiatives, sports and culture.”

The Chicago Morning Star’s listed authors don’t appear to be real and whoever is writing it has a poor grasp of the English language.

Whatever humour we may take from its grammar should be salted with a measure of dread.

It is an example of the growing sophistication of online misinformation campaigns.

If an experienced investigative journalist could fall for a fake news site and have his findings shared by a university professor on Twitter, then what is the hope for the rest of us to know what is true on the internet?

And what does that mean for the future of our public discourse?

A Ukrainian-built Cyclone 4M rocket. - Contributed

The Chicago Morning Star piece was published online in early November.

It claimed that their sources inside Ukraine told them the head of the state space agency, Pavel Degtyarenko, had been fired for corruption shortly after it landed a contract to supply rocket components to American company Firefly Aerospace.

The head of the space agency was actually fired.

The state space agency, which would also be the supplier of the Cyclone 4M rockets that Maritime Launch Services intends to use, does have a contract with Firefly Aerospace.

No other English language media outlets were tying the firing to corruption except a community news site in Chicago.

So Marc Boucher, managing editor of the online publication SpaceQ, raised his eyebrows when he saw a tweet by Michael Byers.

The University of British Columbia- based Canada Research Chair in Global Politics and International Law has been a vocal opponent of the proposed Maritime Launch Services planned spaceport for Canso.

Last summer, he spoke via videolink to a meeting of citizens concerned with having rockets launched from within three kilometres of some houses. Byers warned them of toxic floating hydrazine clouds, the potential for explosions and long term environmental and human health effects.

Those dangers, meanwhile, have been denied by Steve Matier, president of Maritime Launch Services. The facility has passed a provincial environmental assessment with a long list of conditions.

Digging deeper on the source

Byers’ tweet was of Bousquet’s Morning File report tying Ukrainian corruption alleged by the Chicago Morning Star to Maritime Launch Services.

“The alarm bells started to ring as soon as I saw it was supposed to be (a) local site with Chicago news, then why have a story that has nothing to do with local news?” said Boucher.

“Then you read the bios of the writers and they don’t even match the timeline the site gives about itself.”

Boucher wrote emails to each of the site’s listed authors and never heard back. None of them could be found on social media. And the head shots of two of them appear to come from stock photo websites The phone number listed for the Chicago Morning Star doesn’t work.

The mailing address turned out to be for a shared office space where the Chicago Morning Star wasn’t a tenant.

Boucher wrote a story with his findings on SpaceQ and published it on Dec. 12.

He also says he emailed Byers and left him a phone message advising him to take down his tweet.

Boucher did not contact Bousquet for his story which was critical of the Halifax Examiner as a publication.

So the Morning File post stayed up on the Halifax Examiner until Monday when Bousquet was contacted by The Chronicle Herald.

“I barely remember this,” said Bousquet, who prepares Morning File on a multitude of topics daily.

“I probably spent 20 minutes or something Googling around … if there’s a mistake, I’ll correct it.”

And he did correct it immediately after being called.

Byers, however, never took down his tweet and never responded to emails or phone calls from Boucher and The Chronicle Herald.

Misinformation; like a virus

David Stein, co-founder and managing partner, the Leaders Fund. - Contributed

"our trust in our institutions, trust in government and trust in each other is essential. Without that there is more and more tribalism." - David Stein

“This is how the creators of misinformation hope for it to work — it’s like a virus put out there to infect a real, credible organization,” said David Stein.

“Then people think that it’s true because it comes to them from a credible source.”

Stein is the co-founder and managing partner of the Leaders Fund, a Canadian venture capital firm that invests in software companies.

His firm has offered up a million-dollar prize to the group of programmers who can create the most effective tool to ferret out fake news.

When the competition opened last summer more than 100 teams of programmers from around Canada entered their proposed softwares. They winnowed the entries down to the 10 most effective to continue development of their tools with a final deadline of June.

Stein called the incident with the Chicago Morning Star “scary” not because of the consequences of this story that appeared in the Halifax Examiner, but because of the potential for misinformation to fundamentally undercut the institutions of our society.

“Living in Canada it is easy to take democracy for granted,” he said.

“As we saw with the (Russian) influence in the last United States election, we saw that manifest itself as citizens who stopped trusting traditional news outlets … our trust in our institutions, trust in government and trust in each other is essential. Without that there is more and more tribalism — people that justify their weakly held world views by looking for opinions that agree with their own.”

The Chicago Morning Star never targeted the Canso Space Port.

And what the media outlet’s purpose is remains hard to determine.

Its stories appear to be altered news releases or pieces sometimes directly copied from other news outlets.

“This is curious,” said Alex Wong, Canada Research Chair in Artificial Intelligence and Medical Engineering.

“Ninety per cent of these sites are actually news aggregators that scrape the internet for content. They are advertisement driven, usually with at least some sort of banner ads.”

But there are no advertisements on the Chicago Morning Star.

If the site isn’t generating ad revenue then it is worth something to someone.

And it would come with costs to both set up and maintain.

Who's spreading misinformation, and why?

While artificial intelligence is often used to pick stories with relevant key words and even alter them slightly, there is still usually a human involved in the process.

Who that is, warns Wong, is almost impossible to determine.

The domain is registered in Hong Kong, but he cautions that doesn’t tell us anything because anyone can register a domain anywhere.

Its content doesn’t show any clear bias to either the right or the left.

Boucher has his own suspicions.

“I think it is a very subtle attempt at trying to influence different areas with respect to (United States) relations with other countries,” said Boucher.

Sites like these can exist, building some semblance of credibility and then be weaponized at a future date by the insertion of stories meant to undermine the credibility of a company, individual or political process.

While Boucher didn’t get a response to the emails he sent to all the staff contacts listed by the Chicago Morning Star, The Chronicle Herald had a bit more luck.

The site lists Gabija Strumilaite as a freelance contributing journalist.

And she was, accidentally.

The young Lithuanian journalist offered up for publication last summer an interview with the former president of her country, Valdas Adamkus, to Chicago news outlets because he had lived in that city for some time.

She received an email from the Chicago Morning Star, which published her story.

She was never paid for it and later noticed that she was listed as one of its freelancers with her headshot. Her repeated attempts to contact the publication to ask that her picture be removed have not gotten a response.

“I'm a bit angry at myself that I didn't examine enough this 'news site' but, as some people say, you live and you learn,' she said in an email.

It looks like we all have a lot to learn about finding truth online even as those spreading disinformation learn new ways to deceive us.

Wong's team at the University of Waterloo is developing an artificial intelligence tool, outside of Stein's contest, to ferret out what's true from what's false.

The idea is that it will be a program a journalist or private citizen can drop a document into, have it read and its information held up to credible sources on the internet for accuracy.

'It will be a constant battle,' said Wong.

'And the bigger goal is a broader social understanding that not everything online is true, even when it's written by people.'

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