THE TOLL FOR TRUTH · PART 5 OF 7
So far in this series, I’ve followed the reader who ends up outside the paywall: the five in six who don’t pay for news, the 50 million Americans in or near news deserts, and the researcher pricing out a literature review one $40 article at a time. Those readers don’t stop looking for information. This post is about what they find.
The vacuum fills itself
When reputable journalism sits behind a gate, the open web doesn’t stay empty. It fills with whatever is cheapest to produce and easiest to distribute: corporate PR, content mills, automated text, and partisan outlets funded by people who want their message read rather than paid for.
Those funding models aren’t distributed evenly. Writing in The New Republic, Alex Pareene argued that while many mainstream and progressive outlets have moved to reader-funded paywalls, much of the conservative media ecosystem is backed by donors and political money, which lets it give content away at scale. You don’t have to accept every part of that argument to see the structural point. Whoever is subsidized can afford to be free, and being free is a distribution advantage.
The effects are measurable. Julian Streyczek’s 2025 study found that greater exposure to paywalls made people 1.6% to 2.4% less likely to correctly answer factual questions about politics, and was associated with lower electoral participation among non-subscribers.
Anatomy of the loop
In the paper, I describe this as the Mass Distribution Loop. It’s more than a metaphor for “going viral.” It’s a self-reinforcing cycle where each stage lowers the cost of the next, so free, low-verification content gains reach with every pass. Meanwhile, paywalled reporting stays on a straight line where every additional reader costs the same to serve.
The five stages of the Mass Distribution Loop, compared with the linear path of the authoritative core. (Figure 12 from the white paper.)
Here are the five stages.
1. Zero-cost production
Subsidized networks don’t need readers to cover their costs. The money comes from donors, political committees, PR budgets, or ads, and the volume that makes possible is now measurable. As of June 2024, NewsGuard had identified 1,265 “pink slime” sites (outlets presenting themselves as neutral local news while backed by partisan groups or hostile governments). That’s more than the 1,213 daily newspapers still operating in the United States.
Fake local news sites now outnumber real daily newspapers in the U.S. Data: NewsGuard (2024).
NewsGuard also documented what appears to be the first crossover between pink slime and AI-generated content: a pro-Russia network of 167 sites. That pushes the marginal cost of each article even closer to zero.
2. Zero-friction access
These sites have no paywall, no login, and no meter. Every article is fully available to readers, social platforms, search engines, and AI crawlers at the same time. Their content travels as complete text. Paywalled reporting travels, if at all, as a headline, a snippet, or a screenshot.
3. Algorithmic amplification
Engagement-ranked platforms reward novelty and emotional intensity, and those traits favor falsehood. In a landmark study of roughly 126,000 rumor cascades spread by about 3 million people on Twitter between 2006 and 2017, Vosoughi, Roy, and Aral found false news was 70% more likely to be retweeted than true news. True stories took about six times as long to reach 1,500 people. Removing bots didn’t change the result. People, not automation, drove the difference.
4. Monetization
Programmatic advertising turns reach into revenue, placing ads across the web algorithmically and often giving advertisers little visibility into where they land. Ahmad and colleagues, writing in Nature, found advertising sustained 74.5% of the misinformation sites they studied, and that companies using digital ad platforms were about ten times more likely to appear on misinformation sites. NewsGuard and Comscore estimated programmatic advertisers send roughly $2.6 billion a year to misinformation publishers.
The two business models now mirror each other.
That produces a strange mirror image. Credible outlets increasingly charge readers. Misinformation outlets charge advertisers and give their content away.
5. Machine ingestion
The loop closes through AI. Open pages are the easiest inputs for AI search and model training, yet many authoritative outlets actively keep themselves out. By the end of 2023, 48% of the most widely used news sites across ten countries were blocking OpenAI’s crawlers, and in the United States the figure was 79%.
What that does to chatbot answers is still debated. A NewsGuard audit found ten leading chatbots repeated false narratives from the Kremlin-linked “Pravda” network (which published an estimated 3.6 million articles in 2024) 33% of the time when prompted about those narratives. An independent audit in the Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review found little evidence of deliberate manipulation and attributed it to “data voids,” topics where reputable information is scarce and low-quality sources dominate.
Either explanation supports the same conclusion. When credible coverage is absent or locked away, whatever remains openly available fills the void.
Priced truth, subsidized falsehood
With each pass through the loop, the subsidized channel’s cost per reader falls. The authoritative core keeps paying the full cost of serving each reader.
This isn’t a temporary imbalance that subscription growth will eventually fix. It’s a structural feature of an information environment where verification is priced and falsehood is subsidized.
In the next post, I’ll look at what that means for the reader: what exactly the paying tier is buying, what everyone else gets instead, and why the publishing industry itself quietly admits the arrangement has a cost.
Up next: The Luxury Tier of Truth (Part 6 of 7)
Read the full paper: This series is adapted from Konderla, J. (2026). The Toll for Truth: Paywalls, Information Deserts, and the Asymmetric Web (Version 1.0) [White paper]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23131192 The paper includes the complete argument and full bibliography.
Sources
Ahmad, W., Sen, A., Eesley, C., & Brynjolfsson, E. (2024). Companies inadvertently fund online misinformation despite consumer backlash. Nature, 630, 123–131. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07404-1
Alyukov, M., et al. (2025). LLMs grooming or data voids? Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review, 6(5). https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/llms-grooming-or-data-voids-llm-powered-chatbot-references-to-kremlin-disinformation-reflect-information-gaps-not-manipulation
Fletcher, R. (2024, February 22). How many news websites block AI crawlers? Reuters Institute. https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/how-many-news-websites-block-ai-crawlers
NewsGuard. (2024, June 11). Sad milestone: Fake local news sites now outnumber real local newspaper sites in U.S. https://www.newsguardtech.com/press/sad-milestone-fake-local-news-sites-now-outnumber-real-local-newspaper-sites-in-u-s/
NewsGuard & Comscore. (2021). Top brands are sending $2.6 billion to misinformation websites each year. https://www.newsguardtech.com/special-reports/brands-send-billions-to-misinformation-websites-newsguard-comscore-report/
Pareene, A. (2020, October 21). Liberals are losing the journalism wars. The New Republic. https://newrepublic.com/article/159825/liberals-losing-journalism-wars-local-news-paywalls
Sadeghi, M., & Blachez, I. (2025, March 6). A well-funded Moscow-based global ‘news’ network has infected Western AI tools. NewsGuard Reality Check. https://www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/a-well-funded-moscow-based-global
Streyczek, J. (2025). Political effects of newspaper paywalls. SSRN. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5124655
Vosoughi, S., Roy, D., & Aral, S. (2018). The spread of true and false news online. Science, 359(6380), 1146–1151. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aap9559