A website purporting to be a local news outlet operating out of a Long Island village has been taken over by anonymous actors pushing puff pieces about China, and Google promoted its work to users before removing it from its news platform, the Washington Examiner has learned.
The Farmingdale Observer’s website claims that it has been providing local news coverage out of its eponymous New York township since 1963. A glance at the outlet’s webpage, however, reveals no local news coverage and a flood of clickbait content. Nestled among the miscellaneous clickbait are several articles advancing narratives similar to those published by outlets run by the Chinese Communist Party.
“China, with nearly 1,700 ship orders booked by 2024, compared with just 5 for the United States, now dominates world naval production,” an article titled “The U.S. military sounds the alarm and requests urgent support against China’s rising power,” reads. “The ability of the US Navy to adapt to these rapid changes and maintain its supremacy in the face of a rising China remains uncertain.”
Other articles hosted on the Farmingdale Observer’s website and published this year praise China’s technological advancements using exaggerated language, push the narrative that Chinese economic growth is outpacing that of the West, and provide favorable coverage to companies favored by the CCP, among myriad other pro-China slants.
The authors listed on the pieces do not show up anywhere else online. One person listed on the website’s masthead, Dave G. Rub, does appear to be real but has not been affiliated with the publication since 2022, per his LinkedIn profile.
A source told the Washington Examiner that Google News, the tech giant’s flagship news aggregator, recommended pro-China content such as this from the Farmingdale Observer.
A Google spokeswoman told the Washington Examiner that outlets must meet transparency standards, such as providing accurate information about their authors and owners, to appear on Google News. The Farmingdale Observer no longer appears in Google News search results following the Washington Examiner‘s inquiry.
The Farmingdale Observer was previously owned by Anton Media Group but was sold to Schneps Media in 2024. The CEO of Schneps Media told the Washington Examiner that the outlet’s website was either hacked or had its domain stolen. The hijacking happened before Schneps Media acquired the site and has been reported to Google, with no action being taken on its part, according to the CEO.
“We don’t comment on actions taken against specific websites, but our spam policies prohibit repurposing expired domains for the purposes of ranking well on Google,” a Google spokeswoman told the Washington Examiner. “We take action on sites globally that don’t follow our policies.”
The spokeswoman explained that Google works diligently to reduce the proliferation of spam on its platforms and to fight against content creators who are attempting to game the search engine.
The Washington Examiner previously reported that Google labels media produced by the CCP’s propaganda ministry as “news” and promotes it to users. Google is far from the only large tech company entangled in the CCP’s global influence effort. Meta, for instance, accepts funds from Chinese government-run media websites to promote their stories on Facebook and Instagram, while X allows CCP-run news outlets to publish content without disclaimers disclosing their ties to Beijing.
“Reports of the CCP infiltrating local media are alarming, but not surprising,” Rep. Nick LaLota (R-NY), who represents a district on Long Island, told the Washington Examiner. “It tracks with their infiltration of Governor [Kathy] Hochul’s top staff, cheating us on trade, harassing our military, and facilitating the flow of fentanyl across our southern border. If the CCP is posing as local news to influence Long Islanders, that is a national security threat. Google must fix this immediately, and our intelligence agencies should be involved.”
The Farmingdale Observer’s legitimacy as a local news operation is called further into question by the posisbly foreign servers it uses.
Until April 2024, the Farmingdale Observer’s website was hosted in the U.S., records show. After that point, it was briefly hosted through Infomaniak, a privacy-focused Swiss web hosting service, and then moved to a server in an unknown country maintained by Cloudflare.
The Farmingdale Observer is not the only website purporting to be a local news outlet while pushing out pro-Chinese coverage instead of regional coverage.
The Stewartville Star, which claims to have been covering local news in Minnesota since 1891, has a website now populated by an array of clickbait alongside the occasional pro-Chinese article. Like the Farmingdale Observer, pieces on the Stewartville Star’s website praise China’s “breathtaking ambition,” heap praise on Chinese cities, and laud China’s technological advancement.
GOOGLE FEEDS ARTICLES FROM CHINESE STATE-RUN PROPAGANDA OUTLETS TO AMERICAN READERS
The Stewartville Star followed a similar pattern to the Farmingdale Observer, wherein it long hosted its website on American servers only to briefly move to Swiss servers maintained by Infomaniak, and then finally transferred to Cloudflare servers in an unknown locale.
The Chinese government maintains a large web of media operations intended to influence global audiences, spending billions of dollars every year producing and promoting content that pushes the CCP’s favored narratives.
