  Platforms have struggled to keep pace with the spread of disinformation.
Current responses like user reports, manual analysis, and third-party fact
checking are slow and difficult to scale, and as a result, disinformation can
spread unchecked for some time after being created. Automation is essential for
enabling platforms to respond rapidly to disinformation. In this work, we
explore a new direction for automated detection of disinformation websites:
infrastructure features. Our hypothesis is that while disinformation websites
may be perceptually similar to authentic news websites, there may also be
significant non-perceptual differences in the domain registrations, TLS/SSL
certificates, and web hosting configurations. Infrastructure features are
particularly valuable for detecting disinformation websites because they are
available before content goes live and reaches readers, enabling early
detection. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach on a large corpus of
labeled website snapshots. We also present results from a preliminary real-time
deployment, successfully discovering disinformation websites while highlighting
unexplored challenges for automated disinformation detection.
