The last print run for Hong Kong’s iconic Apple Daily newspaper came on June 24, 2021.
With the Apple Daily’s founder and publisher Jimmy Lai and other executives detained, and the media group’s assets frozen, the paper Lai founded in 1995 came to a halt.
But while the tabloid newspaper known for its pro-democracy stance has come to an end, its domain is still alive—and used for publishing a very different type of content.
The domain is one of several bought by Serbian businessman Nebojsa Vujinovic.
Vujinovic works in the digital market. His model: buying up expired internet domains and trying to cash in on their reputation using the latest technology and marketing techniques.
Vujinovic told VOA that he doesn’t try to fundamentally change the content of the sites that he buys. But, with Apple Daily, he made the changes because he is not interested in politics, especially for business purposes.
"It's a big site, but it didn't even occur to us to continue where the previous owner left off. There is no way we would have done it," Vujinovic said.
That owner — Lai — is currently on trial following charges filed under Hong Kong’s national security law. The 76-year-old has denied the accusations of collusion with foreign forces and sedition.
During that trial, prosecutors have cited Apple Daily’s content as evidence against Lai.
Instead of politics and coverage of Hong Kong, Apple Daily now covers lifestyle, tech, and ideas for birthday greetings.
"Foreigners told me that (Lai) was supposedly nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, and that I write about New Year's and birthday greetings on his website, and they ask me, ‘Where are my morals?’” said Vujinovic. “Since the site is called Apple Daily, we can also write about apples if we want. You cannot rename the domain.”
Vujinovic said he has no interest in politics. As a child, he had to flee the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina and moved to Serbia in the 1990s.
“I left my city when the war broke out and because of it and politics, my childhood was ruined. And the only thing I definitely don't need in my life is politics,” he told VOA.
His changes to Apple Daily have dismayed journalists and media advocates.
Apple Daily had a reputation for its critical articles on Chinese authorities and Hong Kong politics.
Critics see the jailing of Lai as a sign of a declining environment for media in Hong Kong. Lai is one of four jailed Chinese dissidents whom two U.S. lawmakers nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in January.
“It's certainly an interesting development,” said Singapore-based journalist Timothy McLaughlin, adding that Vujinovic’s motives appeared to be “an opportunistic play to make some money.”
McLaughlin, who contributes to The Atlantic, is co-author of the book, Among the Braves: Hope, Struggle, and Exile in the Battle for Hong Kong and the Future of Global Democracy, about human rights and media freedom.
It is likely people still look for the Apple Daily news site, McLaughlin said, adding that its closure left a gap in the media market.
“The kind of op-eds that the paper took toward the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong have vanished. But I think it's also important to remember that the regular kind of reporting that Apple Daily did is also gone,” said McLaughlin. “The kind of day-to-day coverage of issues in the city and what politicians were doing and sort of watchdog role that the newspaper played.”
A former DJ, Vujinovic has bought about 2,000 websites since starting his business in digital marketing. And every day, he says, more than a million domain licenses expire, even for high-profile sites.
"There can be many reasons for domains to expire. Their owners, due to carelessness, may forget to renew domain registration on time or miss notifications about registration expiration,” he said.
Vujinovic and his team of around 60 people use AI tools to provide content to the sites. They generate between 100 and 200 text articles, most in English, each day.
"AI is getting better and better. It dominates throughout the world of information on the internet, but we don't let the machine generate content by itself,” said Vujinovic.
But that approach concerns media ethics experts. The watchdog NewsGuard recently warned of a steep rise in websites styled to look like news outlets.
Since it started tracking the sites, NewsGuard has documented more than 700 with content mostly generated by AI.
Kirk O. Hanson, an applied ethics professor at Santa Clara University in California, said that the use of AI can make the problem of fake news and misrepresentation even bigger.
"Artificial intelligence can spread information much faster because it is able to create millions of messages in a short time and has the ability to imitate others more reliably,” Hanson said. “Therefore, the challenge of separating good information from bad, true from false is much more difficult in the era of artificial intelligence.”
Hanson sees three big ethical challenges to the digital world: employment, misuse of platforms and AI.
"How do you control the ability of artificial intelligence to control, to generate new and false knowledge, and to imitate political actors, business actors," Hanson asked.
Journalist McLaughlin said the fight for media freedom in the past decade has mostly taken place in the online space. Some governments "apply various tactics, from forcing the media to close down, to opening their own fake websites, to buying some well-known domains and then corrupting them,” he said.
“That's something we've seen in Southeast Asia a lot. Newspapers getting taken over by forces, aligned with or close to the government. Then they use the name and start putting out skewed or biased news,” McLaughlin said.
He added that social media platforms present another challenge on manipulated content, saying, “I think a lot of issues out there are playing out online, that bad actors can kind of take advantage of.”
Many media critics agree that the best antidote to these challenges is greater news literacy so audiences know how to access verified and independent news.
This article originated in VOA’s Serbian service. Stefan Miljus contributed to this report from Belgrade.
