By Keach Hagey, Emily Glazer and Rob Barry
On any given day over the past two years, visitors to the home
page of RealClearPolitics were likely to see its famous average of
political polls, a roundup of news and center-right commentary --
and, near the bottom, a link or two to stories from RT.com.
The provenance of the RT headlines was obscured. Readers didn't
immediately know they were clicking on headlines from a Russian
state-backed publication that American intelligence officials
considered the Kremlin's " principal international propaganda
outlet." The news organization, once known as Russia Today, was a
central player in Russia's efforts to disrupt the 2016 U.S.
presidential election.
The U.S. intelligence community's assessment of the Russian
efforts created a backlash against social-media companies, which
were accused of providing platforms for a misinformation campaign
aimed at influencing voters. Facebook Inc., Twitter Inc. and others
have since implemented changes to limit the reach of state-run
media.
Yet RT continues to draw a large American audience, helped
unwittingly by some of America's most prominent conservative
websites. The reason: Those news outlets agreed to join a
distribution network that allows other members' content to be
displayed on their home pages.
The company responsible for RT's presence on RealClearPolitics
is Mixi.Media. Since its launch in 2018, Mixi has assembled a
network of right-leaning publishers, including National Review, The
Daily Caller and Newsmax, as well as mainstream sites like
RealClearPolitics. Also in Mixi's fold are RT and another Russian
state-backed outlet, Sputnik.
The inclusion of state-run media has allowed Russia's propaganda
machine to spread its message across the online news landscape in
the U.S. while escaping the attention that came to Facebook and
Twitter. While the links that Mixi places on its partners' websites
often appear under headings such as "From Our Partners," the source
isn't always clear until after the headline has been clicked. That
is by design.
"If [readers] see RT, they are going to freak out," said Alex
Baron, Mixi's founder.
Mixi has other ties to Russia, though it isn't clear if they
have anything to do with RT's presence on the network. Mr. Baron is
an associate of Russian private-equity magnate Victor Remsha and
there are some technical connections between Mixi and properties
owned by Mr. Remsha.
In interviews with The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Baron has said
Mixi doesn't have any ties with Mr. Remsha's firms and he doesn't
agree with RT's politics. The 33-year-old, who runs Mixi as a side
venture to his day job as a tech director at AccuWeather, said he
pursued a partnership with the outlet because he thought it would
help Mixi grow.
What is clear is the partnership has been fruitful for both.
Mixi is the largest source of RT's "referral traffic" in the U.S.,
delivering 19% of visitors coming from other websites in July, not
including social media, according to web analytics firm SimilarWeb.
Mixi is delivering more U.S. traffic to RT than YouTube, Reddit and
Drudge Report and, at one point this year, Twitter. July was the
last month before some of Mixi's partners began to drop out of or
pull back from the network after being contacted by the Journal for
this story.
"This is an information laundering system where you can put RT
or Sputnik or whatever inside a panel of legitimate outlets in the
U.S., and people don't realize what they are coming onto," said
Clint Watts, a former special agent at the Federal Bureau of
Investigation and senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research
Institute studying social-media influence. "The attribution is so
obscure that you don't know who the hell it is."
Social-media companies have been tightening their policies on
misinformation and propaganda since 2017. Google's YouTube added
labels to state-run media, including RT, in 2018. Facebook took
similar action this June. In August, Twitter started labeling RT
and other state-run media and stopped including their content on
various recommendation systems, effectively making those tweets
harder to find.
From the start of 2018 through July, RT's social-media traffic
in the U.S. has dropped 22%, while its overall U.S. traffic has
declined 14%, according to SimilarWeb. RT.com had about 4 million
visits in the U.S. in July, according to SimilarWeb.
Anna Belkina, RT's deputy editor in chief, has denounced as
"blatantly discriminatory" social-media companies' moves to label
RT and other state media. RT has denied working on behalf of the
Kremlin.
Some publishers hosting Mixi's traffic exchange on their
websites say they weren't aware RT was part of Mixi's network.
Following the Journal's inquiries about Mixi and RT's inclusion in
its network, two of those publishers, The Blaze and 247WallSt, said
they removed the Mixi-run section from their sites.
Mixi's Mr. Baron said an additional three -- including Newser,
NOQ Report and his employer, AccuWeather -- also removed Mixi after
the Journal's inquiries. AccuWeather declined to comment on Mr.
Baron's involvement in Mixi.
Mixi's system works like this: When readers click on a Mixi
headline, they first land on a "transit" page on Mixi's own
website. That page will feature another link to the original
headline along with headlines from various publishers that Mixi
aggregates. Users sometimes click on multiple links on the transit
page, boosting traffic for the entire network. Publishers don't pay
to be part of Mixi's network. Mixi makes money from ads on the
transit page.
Taboola, a much larger content-recommendation company, also has
RT in its network, but Mixi drives a lot more traffic to RT,
according to SimilarWeb.
Mr. Baron began working for Mr. Remsha, the Russian
private-equity magnate, in 2014 at WhoTrades, a New York-based
online brokerage firm. The next year, he moved to another of Mr.
Remsha's U.S.-based holdings, a content-recommendation network
called Ideal Media Inc. that functioned much like Mixi.
Ideal lost money and required additional investment. Around
2017, it was purchased by MGID, another company backed by Mr.
Remsha, according to Mr. Baron and other people familiar with the
matter. Mr. Baron was fired in March 2018 and accused by Ideal of
stealing money, contracts and equipment, according to court
documents from litigation that ensued.
Lawyers for Mr. Baron, who denied the allegations and said Ideal
owed him the money, described Mr. Remsha in court documents as "a
Russian oligarch billionaire with ties to Russian President
Vladimir Putin." Michael Korsunsky, the chief executive officer of
MGID's North American business, called Mr. Baron's court filing
"the best science fiction of my life." In June, a judge ruled in
favor of Ideal. Mr. Baron said he plans to appeal.
Soon after his firing, Mr. Baron began building Mixi.
Despite Mr. Baron's sour exit from Ideal, Mixi maintained
various technological links to Mr. Remsha's firms. At various
points since 2018, Mixi shared at least two IP addresses with a
news aggregator called smi2, according to a Journal review of data
from internet forensics firm Farsight Security Inc. smi2 is partly
owned by Mr. Remsha's investment conglomerate, Finam. Sharing IP
addresses -- codes that help computers find each other on the
internet -- suggests websites have overlapping hosting
infrastructure, according to Farsight.
Mr. Baron initially told the Journal that Mixi didn't have any
links to Mr. Remsha's firms. After the Journal sent examples of
code on Mixi's site that had been communicating with the servers of
Mr. Remsha's Finam and smi2, Mr. Baron said Mixi removed the code.
He said his hosting infrastructure doesn't overlap with Finam's and
he doesn't know why the IP addresses would overlap.
Mr. Remsha said he wasn't aware of any ongoing technical
connections between Mixi and smi2. He said he isn't involved in
Russian politics, and that he doesn't believe Mr. Baron is involved
in politics either. He added he was "not so much involved in the
process" of the lawsuit against Mr. Baron, although he was aware of
it "at a high level."
To launch Mixi, Mr. Baron tried to rebuild a network with many
of the same partners as Ideal's. Several mainstream media outlets
didn't participate. MarketWatch experimented for a few months in
2019 but declined to continue, people familiar with the partnership
said. MarketWatch and the Journal are both owned by News Corp.
Mr. Baron said he knows RT is the most controversial of his
roughly three dozen partners, but that he pursued the publication
for years because it is such a big force on the internet.
He said he is beginning to regret its place in the network in
light of how other partners have responded. "I kind of wish I never
went into business with RT," he said.
RealClearPolitics, ZeroHedge and Newsmax, three of the top 10
recipients of Mixi's traffic, have had RT stories appear recently
in their content-recommendation sections operated by Mixi.
RealClearPolitics Publisher Tom Bevan said his tech team uses
many services like Mixi to boost traffic and that he wasn't aware
of RT's inclusion. Mr. Bevan said RealClearPolitics itself has
never linked to a single story from RT.
"We do not have editorial control over all the content in
third-party advertising widgets and routinely attempt to block
inappropriate advertising content," he said.
The site asked Mixi to stop featuring RT headlines in its
recommendation section after the Journal contacted
RealClearPolitics, Mr. Baron said.
A ZeroHedge spokesman said it doesn't track content promoted by
Mixi or the traffic it provides because it is among "countless"
recommendation partnerships the site uses. Newser didn't respond to
requests for comment.
Newsmax CEO Christopher Ruddy said he had "no idea" that Mixi
was putting RT stories on his site.
Following the Journal's inquiry, 247WallSt, a financial news and
opinion publisher, said it was taking the Mixi section off its site
because it was initially unaware that Russia-backed publishers or
right-leaning sites like ZeroHedge were among its partners, editor
in chief Douglas McIntyre said.
"I was very upfront about RT with everyone," Mr. Baron said,
adding that the network delivers more traffic for partners who
don't limit what publications Mixi can promote.
--Lisa Schwartz contributed to this article.
Write to Keach Hagey at keach.hagey@wsj.com, Emily Glazer at
emily.glazer@wsj.com and Rob Barry at rob.barry@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
October 07, 2020 09:56 ET (13:56 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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