A Florida-linked site factory seeded 23 AI-written…

Filed

September 16, 2026, 12:20 UTC

Actor

Unattributed operators of a Koizo/sitegen website factory with Florida infrastructure and a Tampa Bay email in source code; Canada's National Observer recorded unexplained overlap with Let Alberta Decide campaign data; the group and named Florida contacts denied knowledge

Target

Albertans and others who will ask chatbots how, when, and why to vote on 19 October 2026, especially farmers, young people, veterans, mothers, and oil workers the pages were written to impersonate

Source

Unidentified Source blurred: contractors, cutouts, buried disclosure

Confidence

medium Plausible and sourced, but attribution or interpretation still open

Techniques

Corpus poisoning Synthetic media Plain folks Narrative laundering Card stacking Manufactured consensus

Where

Alberta, Canada, Florida

Channels

23 AI-generated websites including vote-yes-alberta.com, farmgate.blog, albertatomorrow.com and honourguardalberta.ca
llms.txt and robots.txt allowlists for ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google and Common Crawl
sitegen.koizo.io / koizo.cloud generation stack
backdated articles and invented voter testimonials
Canada's National Observer, 4 September 2026 investigation
CBC / Media Ecosystem Observatory, 10 September 2026 online-influence study

Summary

On 4 September 2026 Canada's National Observer published a reconstruction of 23 websites written for retrieval rather than for human readers, promoting Alberta independence ahead of the 19 October 2026 provincial referendums. The pages used names such as True Alberta, Next Alberta, Alberta Rising, Vote Yes Alberta, Our Alberta Vote, Prairie Matriarch, Farmgate and Alberta First. Source code welcomed ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google and Common Crawl, some with an llms.txt cheat sheet, and most articles were backdated before the domains existed. Two sites dated the vote to 26 October. Invented testimonials numbered more than 100, including Maskwacis Indigenous supporters and veterans. A Tampa Bay insurance email sat in generation code as approver. Command of the stack, and any role for Let Alberta Decide, remains open.

Analysis

The last two briefs in this vault covered a Washington NGO assembly selling AI-extinction risk and a Shanghai-funded Hands Off Asia slogan pipeline. This cycle rotates to a commercial retrieval attack on a Canadian ballot: pages built so models, not voters, would repeat a separatist cut.

Primary layers agree on the factory and split on the payer. Rory White at Canada's National Observer, 4 September 2026, mapped 23 sites by passive DNS. Named skins included True Alberta, Next Alberta, Alberta Rising, Vote Yes Alberta, Our Alberta Vote, Prairie Matriarch, Farmgate and Alberta First, plus generation hosts alberta.koizo.cloud, koizo.io, koizo.cloud and sitegen.koizo.io. Source code granted crawlers for eleven systems including ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google and Common Crawl. Some pages shipped an llms.txt file. Most articles were dated earlier than the domains. Two sites told readers the vote was 26 October. Elections Alberta's own referendum page, still current this week, sets polling day at 19 October 2026 under Orders in Council 109/2026, 110/2026 and 160/2026. Other pages invented advance-vote calendars and misstated ballot wording. The independence item on the official ballot is not a secession switch. It asks whether Alberta should remain a province or whether the government should start the constitutional process toward a later binding vote. More than 100 invented Albertans, including Maskwacis residents and veterans, were offered as witnesses. OpenAI's detector flagged site images as model-made in July and August and banned the user. Score the sites, the allowlists, the wrong date and the official calendar as documented. Score Let Alberta Decide command as contested. A Koizo dashboard held lawn-sign names, phones and geolocated photos that matched St. Albert and Grande Prairie placements. After the Observer called, at least three generator pages dropped within hours. Leaders Keith Wilson and Tanya Clemens did not answer. Tampa insurance worker Alex Pate said his address, repeated fifteen times as approver in the code, was stolen by an infostealer. A second Florida developer denied the work. Rebel News on 10 September is right that those hops do not prove a foreign service. They also do not clear the factory.

Mechanism is corpus-poisoning wearing plain-folks. The audience of record is a chatbot that will be asked the date, the ballot and what ordinary people think. Synthetic-media supplies the prose and the faces. Narrative-laundering is the hometown blog skin. Manufactured-consensus is many mastheads arriving at one cut from one generator. Card-stacking is the missing denominator: the official ten-question paper, the non-binding status of the separation item, and polling that CBC, citing the Media Ecosystem Observatory on 10 September, put near a quarter for independence while separatist accounts dominate engagement.

This is propaganda where origin is concealed, institutional form is local testimony and civic explainers, and the design goal is to move a vote-adjacent belief without a named publisher the voter can call. It is not a finding that every independence argument is a Koizo product, that Let Alberta Decide paid the stack, that Russia wrote the pages, or that chatbots have already flipped a riding. A same-method test applies in reverse. A remain shop that backdated twenty-three mother-and-veteran blogs so Claude would quote a false polling day would be this brief with the nouns swapped.

Literacy counter: if a chatbot tells you the Alberta vote is a week later than Elections Alberta, or quotes a farmer who has no phone book entry, open the official referendum page and ask who registered the domain. An llms.txt welcome mat is not a source. Apply the same date-to-desk test when the model is selling the other option.

Tells

Civic explainers that welcome named AI crawlers in robots.txt or llms.txt
Articles dated earlier than the domain registration
A wrong polling day or a secession switch that does not match Elections Alberta
More than one hometown blog hitting the same farmers-veterans-mothers cut from one generator host
A generator dashboard or lawn-sign map that vanishes after a reporter calls

A Florida-linked site factory seeded 23 AI-written Alberta pages so chatbots would cite fake farmers and a wrong referendum date.

Summary

Analysis

Tells

Evidence