Hong Kong-registered BM Web Solutions runs four AI news…

Filed

September 11, 2026, 21:20 UTC

Actor

BM Web Solutions Limited (Hong Kong company incorporated 27 April 2026; directors named on the corporate record as Martin Mitushev and Borche Ivanovski, North Macedonian passport holders) operating four English-language mastheads: The Levantine (levantinereport.com), Frontline Radar (frontlineradar.com), Diplomatic Post (diplomaticpost.com) and Global Reporters (globalreporters.com)

Target

Policy and institutional audiences in European capitals (Meta targeting names Berlin, Brussels, Frankfurt, Strasbourg and Paris; France took about 49 percent of 5.04 million EU accounts reached in the OSINT report) plus selected Arab capitals named in LinkedIn geos

Source

Unidentified Source blurred: contractors, cutouts, buried disclosure

Confidence

high Multiple independent open sources, low disagreement about the facts

Techniques

Narrative laundering Manufactured consensus Synthetic media Card stacking Astroturfing

Where

Sudan, European Union, Hong Kong, North Macedonia, United Arab Emirates

Channels

four English-language geopolitical news websites launched May-June 2026
LinkedIn advertising archive records paid by BM Web Solutions Limited
Meta/Facebook ads including a Daniel Mercer / Noise Filter distribution page
shared Google Tag Manager client ID 979502 and template __cvt_T5J4V
shared Taboola publisher 2049803
Hong Kong Companies Registry filing for BM Web Solutions Limited
real named editors used as masthead warrant then removed from staff pages on 7 September 2026

Summary

On 9 September 2026 researcher Marc Owen Jones published an investigation, with a companion OSINT report updated through 9 September, showing that The Levantine, Frontline Radar, Diplomatic Post and Global Reporters are one publishing and advertising operation. The four sites, live from late May 2026, produced 3,708 articles by 2 September and bought 558 LinkedIn and Meta ads. Nothing on any site tells readers the others exist, yet they share a LinkedIn payer (BM Web Solutions Limited, Hong Kong, incorporated 27 April 2026 by two North Macedonian passport holders), a Google Tag Manager fingerprint, a Taboola publisher ID, and in three cases one Cloudflare account. Paid creatives over-represent Sudan, the Sudanese Armed Forces and Islamist/Muslim Brotherhood themes relative to the article pile, and contain no captured attack on the Rapid Support Forces and no captured attack on the UAE. Jones states he has not identified the customer. Confidence is high on the shared infrastructure and the paid-versus-corpus skew; medium on who commissioned the buy.

Analysis

The load-bearing object this cycle is not a bot farm and not a named foreign ministry. It is a cluster of four English-language news costumes, stood up in late May 2026, that look independent to a scroller and act as one shop to an advertiser, a tag manager and a company registry.

Jones's 9 September Substack and the public OSINT report titled From Hong Kong to Khartoum reconstruct the linkage from primary surfaces rather than from adjectives. LinkedIn's ad archive lists BM Web Solutions Limited as payer on the captured LinkedIn buy. Hong Kong records show that company incorporated on 27 April 2026 by two people holding North Macedonian passports; one of those names engages the outlets' LinkedIn pages. The same four sites share Google Tag Manager client ID 979502 and template __cvt_T5J4V, Taboola publisher 2049803, and, on three properties, one Cloudflare account. Publication began within days of one another: Diplomatic Post on 27 May, Frontline Radar on 28 May, Global Reporters on 1 June, The Levantine on 10 June. Output through 2 September is 3,708 articles, about 37 a day. That volume is not a newsroom accident. GPTZero on a fixed-seed sample of ten articles per site scored The Levantine, Diplomatic Post and Frontline Radar at 100 percent AI-written and Global Reporters at about 91 percent. Some published source links still carry ChatGPT tracking tags. Three sites shipped the same privacy-policy template with the placeholder Company Name: [Insert Company Name]. Global Reporters even used an author account labeled AI Admin.

Narrative laundering is the costume. Each masthead performs a different editorial beat so a reader who meets one title does not meet a factory: Frontline Radar leans conflict and defence, Diplomatic Post institutional copy, The Levantine Middle East, Global Reporters volume. Manufactured consensus is the four-brand layer. Nothing on any site discloses the siblings, yet they share payer, tags and recommendation plumbing. Synthetic media is the production line that makes 3,700 articles in three months possible. Astroturf is the staff page: a few real, checkable people (New Jersey councilor Erik D'Amato; Washington Times contributor Joseph Hammond; Belgian journalist Lieven Taillie) sitting above bylines that recycle Vance, Thorne, Mercer, Marcus and Julian, plus stationery-flavored names such as Clara Quill and Beatrix Binder. On 7 September, after the investigation circulated, the real names were stripped from the editorial pages; Wayback copies remain. Card-stacking is not mainly in the raw article pile. It is in the paid selection. Against the recovered corpus, paid promotion over-represents Islamists/Muslim Brotherhood by 5.86 times, Sudan by 4.65 times, SAF/Burhan by 4.59 times and Saudi Arabia by 3.15 times. Across 558 Meta and LinkedIn ads Jones coded, no creative attacks the RSF and no creative attacks the UAE; four UAE creatives are favourable. What they publish and what they pay people to see are different objects.

Why this is propaganda rather than four start-up magazines: origin of the buy is a weeks-old Hong Kong company, institutional form is performed, sibling brands are hidden from the reader, and the paid window is one-sided on a live war. Why it is not a documented state program: Jones writes that he has not found who hired whom. Clash Report and others headline a UAE-Sudan frame; that is an inference from the omitted pile, not a contract, a FARA file or a ministry statement. This brief keeps the customer as unknown. A 9 September rescan also found some LinkedIn pages later displaying Ocean Trend Logistics Limited as payer on two properties while others still showed BM Web Solutions; treat the payer field as a moving label, not as a closed identity.

Literacy counter: when four new 'independent' geopolitics sites appear in the same fortnight, check the ad-library payer, GTM and Taboola IDs, WHOIS change dates, staff pages against archives, and whether the promoted subset matches the article subset. A real editor on a masthead is a transfer device, not clearance. Score the paid window separately from the corpus. Apply the same four-brand-plus-one-payer test to every faction's influence-as-a-service newsrooms.

Tells

Four new geopolitics sites launched within two weeks that never mention one another
One ad-library payer and identical GTM/Taboola fingerprints across the four brands
Staff pages mixing two or three real journalists with stationery-flavored bylines
Privacy-policy template still showing [Insert Company Name]
Paid creatives that attack one camp in a two-camp war and spare the other
Real names stripped from About pages after an investigation lands

Hong Kong-registered BM Web Solutions runs four AI news mastheads whose paid ads, not their full corpus, push one side of Sudan's war into EU policy cities.

Summary

Analysis

Tells

Evidence