(This article first appeared in Broad + Liberty.)
An online news outlet open about its leftward partisan bias is also spending well over a million dollars this year on political Facebook posts boosting Democratic candidates like Kamala Harris and Pennsylvania auditor general candidate Malcolm Kenyatta, sometimes with advertisements that don’t even bother to link to any story produced by the news site.
The finding is the second example in which Democrats and progressives appear to be using news sites less for journalism purposes and more as a launching pad for social media campaigns that, although they may not directly advocate voting for one candidate over another, still appear designed to influence public opinion with positive messages for Democrats.
The Keystone is a left-of-center, online-only outlet that began in 2020, according to its website. “The Keystone is dedicated to providing honest, relevant news for and about Pennsylvania,” the publication’s “about” page says.
While The Keystone may strive occasionally to provide relevant news, it also clearly intends to spend heavily to promote positive messages about Democratic candidates and left-of-center policy ideas through social media, including voter registration drives.
A Broad + Liberty analysis of the Facebook and Instagram ad library shows The Keystone has run 22 total ad sets, each of which has garnered more than one million impressions this year on content boosting presidential candidate Kamala Harris, local Democrats, as well as voter registration efforts. At least seven of those ad sets did not link to a Keystone story. The outlet spent somewhere in the range of $1.37 to $1.62 million on those ad sets.
(The analysis included active and inactive ads boosted by The Keystone from Jan. 1, 2024, to Oct. 28, 2024. An ad set could be a grouping of several ads that have identical or nearly identical content, but which differ in some minor way, such as having different run times. For example, the same ad might have a one-week run in August, another in September, and a third in October. The Facebook ad library would group those ads together as a set in its library.)
Using another search element provided by the Facebook and Instagram ad search shows The Keystone has spent $1.14 million to boost at least 145 different posts from Sept. 26 to Oct. 25.
The site’s “about” page also shows that the outlet has as many community organizers on staff as it does reporters — two of each.
It’s also clear that using social media is a cornerstone of the site’s overall strategy. Consider that the outlet, barely four years old, has 101,000 followers on Facebook. Compare that to a centuries-old institution like the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette which has 165,000 followers. With such a high following in such a short time, it’s almost a certainty the outlet spent money to acquire its followers.
Requests for comment to The Keystone and Courier Newsroom were not returned.
(Examples of three Facebook and/or Instagram posts boosted by The Keystone giving uncritical promotion to Democrats Ismail Smith-Wade-El, Malcolm Kenyatta, and Kamala Harris. All of these posts have received more than 1-million impressions, and failed to link to any article from The Keystone.)
Courier Newsroom has drawn plenty of attention and criticism since its 2019 founding by Tara McGowan, in no small part to McGowan’s resume working as an operative on behalf of major Democratic causes.
A 2019 article from Bloomberg succinctly laid out the strategy of Courier’s local news efforts.
“While the articles she [McGowan] publishes are based on facts, nothing alerts readers that Courier publications aren’t actually traditional hometown newspapers but political instruments designed to get them to vote for Democrats,” the Bloomberg report said. “And although the articles are made to resemble ordinary news, their purpose isn’t primarily to build a readership for the website: It’s for the pieces to travel individually through social media, amplifying their influence with persuadable voters.”
McGowan defended her strategies to Bloomberg.
“A lot of people I respect will see this media company as an affront to journalistic integrity because it won’t, in their eyes, be balanced,” she told the outlet in 2019. “What I say to them is, ‘Balance does not exist anymore.’”
“Without new innovative models for journalism at scale,” McGowan said, “we’re losing the information war to verified liars pouring millions of dollars into Facebook.”
An Axios report from last year said Courier was part of a public benefit corporation backed by liberal billionaires Reid Hoffman and George Soros.
Despite that substantial backing, The Keystone nevertheless solicits donations from its readership. “Our journalism is and will always be free to our readers. But to make that commitment, we need support from folks like you,” the website says.
Running political ads as a news outlet brings a variety of benefits. McGowan and her allies realized early on that people tune out raw political ads, but keep an open mind with news stories shared on social media, the Bloomberg article noted. Additionally, while some social media outlets might restrict a political campaign’s ability to microtarget certain audiences, those same restrictions might not apply to a news organization.
The news outlet NOTUS (News of the United States) cited an online post from 2022 reportedly authored by Courier which bragged about an experiment of running Facebook ads aimed at influencing turnout in the Iowa Democratic primary that year. The experiment focused on delivering social media ads to twelve test counties.
“Specifically, a regression analysis was used to determine whether the change in turnout in the target counties was statistically significant relative to the overall trends in the rest of the state,” the post said. “COURIER estimates 3,300 net votes were cast as a result of its $49,000 boosting program, which comes out to $15 per net vote.”
Courier Newsroom was able to stave off a challenge to the Federal Election Commission that it should register as a political entity. In 2022, a 6-0 ruling from the FEC “rejected allegations that a network of progressive news sites had operated as a de facto Democratic political outfit,” Axios reported.
In September, Broad + Liberty reported on the advertising strategy of the Morning Mirror, which produces fluff pieces on Democrats and then turns those pieces into paid advertisements on Facebook, although with far less of a budget in comparison to Courier Newsroom.
“According to a Broad + Liberty analysis…Morning Mirror has spent somewhere between $57,000 to $70,000 on the Pennsylvania ads [benefiting local Democrats], creating between 3.1 to 3.6 million viewer impressions across those two social media platforms,” we reported at the time.
Broad + Liberty’s reviews of Pennsylvania-specific political ads on Facebook has not yet revealed any right-of-center outlet spending to boost content on behalf of Republicans. If a reader identifies any such activity, please email this author.
