PropOrNot is a website that seeks to expose Russian propaganda and those groups that use material from Russian sources. It has been featured in The Washington Post about Russian propaganda and the spread of fake news. PropOrNot's methods and anonymity have received criticism.
Operations and organization
The website is written anonymously, and purports to be the arbiter of which opinions are not acceptable and which are acceptable, by either labelling or not labelling certain expressed opinions as "propaganda"; a spokesperson for the website who spoke by phone to The New Yorker was described as an American male who was "well versed in Internet culture and swore enthusiastically." The same spokesperson said that the group comprised around 40 unnamed individuals.
Compiled list
PropOrNot publishes a list of some 200 websites they call Russian propaganda based on "a combination of manual and automated analysis, including analysis of content, timing, technical indicators, and other reporting". The group's list includes Zero Hedge, Naked Capitalism, the Ron PaulInstitute, Black Agenda Report, Truthout, Truthdig, antiwar.com, and many others, which the group suggests are "consistently, uncritically, and one-sidedly echoing, repeating, being used by, and redirecting their audiences to Russian official and semi-official state media". CounterPunch in response called PropOrNot a "shady little group," its findings "bogus," and their inclusion on the list a "baseless allegation." After email communications, PropOrNot agreed to remove CounterPunch from the list. PropOrNot has said there was a Russian propaganda effort involved in propagating fake news during the 2016 presidential election. PropOrNot has said it analyzed data from Twitter and Facebook and tracked propaganda from a disinformation campaign by Russia that had a national reach of 15 million people within the United States. PropOrNot concluded that accounts belonging to both Russia Today and Sputnik News promoted "false and misleading stories in their reports," and additionally magnified other false articles found on the Internet to support their propaganda effort.
Criticism
PropOrNot's methods and anonymity have received criticism from publications such as The New Yorker, The Intercept, and Rolling Stone, as well as Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. Andrew Cockburn, Washington editor for Harper's, was sharply critical of The Washington Posts decision to put the story on its front page, calling the article a "sorry piece of trash." Writers in The Intercept, Fortune, and Rolling Stone challenged The Washington Post for including a report by an organization with no reputation for fact-checking in an article on "fake news." The Intercept journalists Glenn Greenwald and Ben Norton were particularly critical of the inclusion of Naked Capitalism on the list of "useful idiots" for Russian propagandists. Later, in The New Yorker, Adrian Chen said that he had been previously contacted by the organization, but had chosen not to follow up with them. Looking more carefully into their methodology, he argued that PropOrNot's criteria for establishing propaganda were so broad that they could have included "not only Russian state-controlled mediaorganizations, such as Russia Today, but nearly every news outlet in the world, including the Post itself" on their list. Eliot Higgins of the Bellingcat website told Chen: "I think it should have never been an article on any news site of any note." Writing for Rolling Stone magazine, Matt Taibbi questioned the methodology used by PropOrNot and the lack of information about who was behind the organization. In December 2016, after receiving criticism, The Washington Post appended an "Editor's Note" to its article in response to the criticism of PropOrNot's list of websites. The note read, "The Post, which did not name any of the sites, does not itself vouch for the validity of PropOrNot's findings regarding any individual media outlet, nor did the article purport to do so."
